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113^ t\)t g>ame autt)or 



Walt Whitman 

The Amateur Spirit 

A Study of Prose Fiction 

The Powers at Play 

The Plated City 

Salem Kittredge and Other Stories 

The Broughton House 



WALT WHITMAN 

HIS LIFE AND WORK 

BY 

BLISS PERRY 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 




BOSTON AND NEW YORK 

HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANY 
1906 









COPYRIGHT 1906 BY BLISS PERRY 
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 

Published October iqob 



WALT WHITMAN 



r'f(^ 



PREFACE 

The publishers of this book hoped for many years 
that Mr. John Burroughs, one of Walt Whitman's 
oldest friends, would write Whitman's Life. As 
other literary engagements prevented Mr. Bur- 
roughs from carrying out this plan, I was asked to 
undertake the present volume. Mr. Burroughs 
has generously aided me in many ways, and has 
allowed me to make use of manuscript material in 
his possession. Mrs. Ellen M. Calder of Provi- 
dence, the widow of Whitman's friend William 
Douglas O'Connor, promptly placed in my hands 
the very large collection of letters by the poet and 
by his friends and correspondents, originally gath- 
ered by Mr. O'Connor. Mr. J. T. Trowbridge and 
Professor Edward Dowden have allowed me to 
draw freely upon Whitman's letters to them. 

I am also indebted to Mr. E. C. Stedman, to 
Dr. Weir Mitchell,and to Mr. R. W. Gilder for 
their courteous assistance. Dr. Talcott Williams 



vi PREFACE 

of Philadelphia, with his characteristic generos- 
ity toward literary workers, gave me access to his 
rich collection of Whitman material. Mr. Horace 
Traubel, one of Whitman's literary executors, 
and Mr. Laurens Maynard of Small, Maynard 
& Co., Whitman's publishers, have aided me in 
every way possible. I am indebted to Mr. Charles 
H. Ames of Boston for pointing out the singular 
stylistic correspondence between Samuel War- 
ren's The Lily and the Bee and Whitman's 
Leaves of Grass. My thanks are due to Profes- 
sor Charles F. Eichardson of Dartmouth for writ- 
ing out the curious story of Whitman's visit to 
Hanover in 1872 ; and to John Boyd Thacher, 
Esq., of Albany, for allowing me to print, from 
the manuscript in his possession, Whitman's 
interesting cwticism of his own poem on that occa- 
sion. 

Mr. Alfred Bowditch of Boston, the present 
owner of Truman H. Bartlett's cast of Whit- 
man's hand, has kindly allowed me to have it 
photographed. My acknowledgments should 
also be made to William Sloane Kennedy, to 
Professor F. N. Scott of the University of Mich- 
igan, to Mr. Albert Phelps of New Orleans, to 



PREFACE vii 

Professor George H. Palmer of Harvard Uni- 
versity, to Mr. William Roscoe Thayer, to Miss 
Jeannette Gilder, and to Miss Elizabeth Porter 
Gould, for information which has proved of ser- 
vice. Two books about Whitman which have 
appeared while my own work was in progress — 
H. B. Binns's Life of Walt Whitman and Horace 
Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden — 
have helped me at many points. 

My friend Mr. M. A. De Wolfe Howe has 
been good enough to read this volume in manu- 
script, and to give me the opportunity of profiting 
by a criticism as accomplished as it is kindly. 

Bliss Perry. 

Cambridge, June, 1906. 



CONTENTS 

I. A Child Went Forth (1818-1839) 1 

II. The Caresser of Life (1839-1855) 21 

III. Leaves of Grass . . (1855-1861) 67 

IV. War-Time (1861-1865) 132 

V. The Clerk and His 

Friends .... (1865-1873) 158 

VI. The Camden Bard . (1873-1892) 214 

VII. After Fifty Years 273 

Index 309 



LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

Whitman about 1880 (Photogravure) Frontispiece 
From a photograph presented by Whitman to 
Professor George Herbert Palmer 

Whitman in 1854 38 

From the Harrison daguerreotype, engraved by 
S. Hollyer for the frontispiece of the first (1855) 
edition of Leaves of Grass. 

Cover of the First Edition of Leaves of 

Grass 74 

Cover of the Second Edition of Leaves of 

Grass 114 

Whitman in 1863 140 

The Gardner portrait. 

Whitman's Review of his Dartmouth Poem 206 

Manuscript in the possession of John Boyd Thacher, 
Esq. 

Ticket of Admission to Whitman's Lincoln 

Lecture 224 

From the Whitman Collection of Talcott Williams, 
LL. D. 

Whitman's Hand 258 

Cast by Truman H. Bartlett, now in the possession 
of Alfred Bowditch, Esq., photographed by H. 
W. Gleason. 

Close of Whitman's Will of 1873 .... 302 

In the possession of John Burroughs. 



WALT WHITMAN 



CHAPTER I 

A CHILD WENT FORTH 

" Starting from fish-shape Pannianok where I was bom, 
Well-begotten, and rais'd by a perfect mother." 

Leaves of Grass. 

To find the birthplace of Walt Whitman one 
must journey thirty miles eastward from New 
York, by the Long Island Railroad. It is a flat, 
pleasant country, now more suburban than rural. 
Long Island Sound is on the left, but is out 
of sight. By and by the track begins to climb 
among thickly wooded hills. Here is Cold Spring, 
the border town of Suffolk County, and the next 
stop is Huntington, where one leaves the train. 
The main village, a mile north of the railroad, 
clusters sleepily around the Harbor, a deep inlet 
from the Sound. The good anchorage, and the 
fertile, well-watered farm lands around it, early 
attracted colonists from New England, who were, 
according to a local historian, " earnest in cher- 
ishing and extending the genial influence of 



2 WALT WHITMAN 

Christianity." Huntington was thus settled in 
1653 by a colony from Sandwich, Massachusetts. 
For some six miles square of excellent land they 
paid the native Indians "6 coats, 6 kettles, 6 
hatchets, 6 howes, 6 shirts, 10 knives, 6 fathom 
of wampum, 30 muxes [eel-spears], 30 needles." 
Three years later the township was increased by 
the Eastern Purchase, "in consideration of two 
coates, fore shertes, seven quarts of licker and 
aleven ounces of powder." ^ It does not appear, 
however, that there were any Whitmans among 
these promoters of the genial influences of Chris- 
tianity. By 1660, the little settlement of Hun- 
tington, fearing trouble with the Dutch neigh- 
bors who crowded it closely upon the west, 
passed under the protection of Connecticut. In 
or about that year, Joseph Whitman,^ the first 
known ancestor of Walt, crossed the Sound 
from Stratford, Connecticut, and took up a 
farm in Huntington. Undoubtedly he was born 

1 Huntington Town Records, vol. i. 

2 Dr. R. M. Bucke and subsequent biographers, including 
Whitman himself, have supposed that Joseph Whitman vras 
the son of the Rev. Zechariah Whitman, an Independent cler- 
gyman of Milford, Conn., who had come from England in 1635, 
and who was the brother of John Whitman, — the ancestor of 
most of the American Whitmans, — who had come to Wey- 
mouth, Mass., in the True Love in 1640. Zechariah Whitman, 
however, died without issue, leaving his property to a nephew, 
the Rev. Zechariah "Whitman the younger. See The Descend- 
ants of John Whitman, by C. H. Farnam, New Haven, 1889. 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 3 

in England, as the records of the General Court 
of New Haven show that he was a resident of 
Stratford as early as 1655. His fellow towns- 
men in Huntington chose him as constable in 
1665, and afterwards elected him to other offices. 
The names of his children cannot definitely be 
traced, but his grandson Nehemiah was Walt 
Whitman's great-grandfather. It is not unlikely 
that the "John Whitman, Sr." who joined the 
First Church of Huntington in 1728, and held 
many town offices between 1718 and 1730, was 
the son of Joseph and the father of Nehemiah.^ 
At any rate the tribe increased. In 1694 " Whit- 
man's dale or hollow " is mentioned in a patent es- 
tablishing the boundaries of Huntington. With- 
in the limits of the township distinct hamlets 
were already forming, such as Cold Spring, in the 
northwest corner of the grant, where lived the 
Dutch family of Van Velsors. Three or four 
miles south of Huntington Harbor was another 
hamlet named AVest Hills, where the long level 
meadows are suddenly hemmed in by ridges 
of glacial gravel. From the wooded summits of 
these hills, — the highest land upon Long Island 
— one may catch a glimpse to the northward of 
the Sound, or may see the flash of the Atlantic 
a dozen miles to the south. 

^ See the Records of the First Church of Huntington, L. I., 
and the Huntington Town Records abeady cited. 



4 WALT WHITMAN 

It was here that the Whitmans flourished, 
their great farms spreading over the fat mead- 
ows and up into the woodland. Nehemiah Whit- 
man is said to have owned at one time nearly 
five hundred acres, tilled by slaves. His wife, 
the poet's great-grandmother, made a vigorous 
overseer, swearing at her slaves from horseback, 
using tobacco freely, and living to be ninety. In 
Walt Whitman's sketch of Elias Hicks,^ the fa- 
mous Quaker preacher, he mentions " my great- 
grandfather Whitman" as a frequent companion 
of Elias at merrymakings before the Revolution- 
ary War. But inasmuch as Elias Hicks (1748-- 
1830), was more than forty years younger than 
Nehemiah Whitman, it is probable that Walt 
had in mind his grandfather Jesse (1749-1803), 
who was nearly the same age as the mystical 
preacher. Jesse Whitman succeeded in due time 
to the paternal farm and lived in the " old house " 

— a portion of which was standing until recently 

— where his father, Nehemiah, had been born and 
had died. He married in 1775 a schoolmistress, 
Hannah Brush, and among their children was 
Walter Whitman (1789-1855), the father of 
the poet. 

Walter Whitman varied the ancestral occu- 
pation by turning carpenter and house-builder. 
He was a big-boned, silent, troubled-looking man, 

1 Prose Works, p. 459. 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 5 

wrathful upon occasion. Though in no wise 
prominent in the community, he was a good 
workman, and was respected by his neighbors. 
Like most of the older families in Huntington, 
the Whitmans during the eighteenth century had 
lost the church-going habit. But they " leaned 
to the Quakers," it was said, and Walter Whit- 
man retained a sort of dumb loyalty to Elias 
Hicks. " I can remember," ^ wrote the poet in 
1888, describing his boyhood in Brooklyn, sixty 
years before, " my father coming home toward 
sunset from his day's work as carpenter, and 
saying briefly as he throws down an armful of 
kindling blocks with a bounce on the kitchen 
floor, ' Come, mother, Elias preaches to-night.' " 
Then the mother would hasten the supper and 
the table-cleaning, and they would start for the 
meeting. 

The poet's mother, " a daily and daring rider " 
in her youth, — a stout, placid matron in a 
checked gown, as the daguerreotype reveals her, 
— was Louisa Van Velsor (1795-1873) of Cold 
Spring. Her father. Major Cornelius Van Velsor, 
was a loud-voiced, ruddy-faced horse-breeder. 
The Van Velsors were pure Dutch, but "the 
Major " had married a young woman of Welsh 
descent and Quaker sympathies named Amy 
(Naomi) Williams. Her father was Captain 

1 Prose Works, p. 465. 



6 WALT WHITMAN 

Jolin Williams, a sailor of likable personality, 
and lier mother was Mary WooUey, whom piti- 
less tradition records as " shiftless." It will thus 
be seen that Louisa Van Velsor was of mingled 
Dutch and Welsh blood, with an English strain 
for tempering. She was almost illiterate, but 
her son was never weary of praising her as a 
" perfect mother," and, like many another poet, 
he seems to have felt more directly indebted 
to her than to his father for his inheritance 
of gifts. His description from memory of the 
long-vanished Van Velsor homestead is full of 
charm, as he recalls the " rambling dark-gray 
shingle-sided house, with sheds, pens, a great 
barn, and much open road-space ; . . . the vast 
kitchen and ample fireplace and the sitting- 
room adjoining, the plain furniture, the meals, 
the house full of merry people, my grandmother 
Amy's sweet old face in its Quaker cap, my 
grandfather ' the Major,' jovial, red, stout, with 
sonorous voice and characteristic physiognomy." 
As one reads these characterizations of the 
distaff side of the poet's ancestry, with such ad- 
jectives as " jovial," " genial," " shiftless," and 
" sweet " chiming through them like pleasant 
bells, one can readily believe that the Van Vel- 
sors were more interesting and varied in char- 
acter than the Whitmans. For more than a 
century and a half preceding the poet's birth 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 7 

the Whitmans had lived in Huntington without 
becoming specially noted for public service 
or personal distinction. Prosperous and prolific 
enough, they seem to have been without the in- 
tellectual ambition which was sending sons of the 
New England Whitmans to Harvard and Yale, 
and without the moral fervor that drove Marcus 
Whitman, in Walt's early manhood, upon his in- 
domitable journeys to and from Oregon. The 
stock seems to have been at its best about the close 
of the Revolution. Huntington suffered severely 
in that struggle, and many of the Whitmans 
enlisted. In the assessment of taxable pro- 
perty at the end of the war, Isaiah, Nehemiah, 
and Stephen Whitman, all heads of families, 
appear as substantial land owners, while Jesse 
Whitman, Nehemiah's son, is taxed for consider- 
ably less. Shortly thereafter the race seems to 
scatter and decline, producing at last one man 
of genius, and then swiftly, in the melancholy 
New England vocabulary, "petering out." 

When Walter Whitman the carpenter took 
home his bride Louisa Van Velsor, in 1816, it 
was to the " new house," built half a dozen years 
before. The pilgrim finds it practically unchanged 
to-day. It stands close to a cross-road, a little to 
the left of the old main road that runs from 
Huntington southward across the Island. This 
old road has now become " New York Avenue," 



8 WALT WHITMAN 

and is soon to be invaded by the electric car, but 
the cross-roads, shaded by scrub oak, locusts, and 
cedars, retain something of their ancient charm. 
The gray, wide-shingled, weather-beaten houses 
— r usually with a duck-pond in front and an un- 
trimmed apple orchard behind — are of an eight- 
eenth century type. The Whitman house is 
scarcely more than twenty feet square, with an 
" L " still smaller ; a high-pitched, awkward roof- 
tree enough, lately covered with new shingles, bu^ 
otherwise unaltered. Upon a marble slab affixed 
to a boulder by the roadside is the inscription : — 

To Mark the Birthplace 

of Walt Whitman 

The Good Gray Poet 

Born May 31, 1819 

Erected by the Colonial Society 

of Huntington, 1905. 

The poet was the second of nine children, 
seven of whom were boys. He was named after 
his father, but was always called " Walt " in 
childhood to distinguish him from the carpenter ; 
and though he signed himself " Walter Whit- 
• man " during the earliest years of authorship, 
he reverted in 1855, and held uniformly there- 
after, to the more intimate and affectionate 
** boyhood name. He had a brother Jesse, a year 
older than himself. The next two children were 
girls, and the fifth child died in infancy. Three 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 9 

younger brothers bore the patriotic names of An- 
drew Jackson, George Washington and Thomas 
Jefferson. The last, born when Walt was four- 
teen, became the object of his special care and 
companionship. The youngest child, Edward, 
was imbecile ; the oldest died a lunatic ; and in- 
deed none of the children, except Walt, showed 
any marked intellectual or moral stamina. 

The family life of the Whitmans was char- 
acterized by the absolute simplicity common to 
American rural homes in the early part of the 
nineteenth century. Whittier, born a dozen 
years before Walt Whitman, has left pleasing 
pictures of a boyhood passed under the hard and 
narrow conditions of the farm. The few glimpses 
that we have of the Whitman home reveal a 
less strenuous existence ; there is more freedom, 
spontaneity, laxity, with the same atmosphere of 
vigorous health. The little Walt must have 
looked like a sturdy, jolly Dutch baby, with 
singularly fair skin, hair "black as tar," — as 
he told Mrs. O'Connor, — and blue-gray eyes 
that early caught the trick of gazing steadily. 
His own memories of childhood show how 
deeply the sights and sounds of West Hills 
entered into his being : — 

" The early lilacs became part of this child, 
And grass and white and red morning glories, and white 
and red clover and the song of the phcebe-bird, 



10 WALT WHITMAN 

And the third-month lambs and the sow's pink-faint lit- 
ter, and the mare's foal and the cow's calf, 

And the noisy brood of the barn-yard or by the mire of 
the pond-side." 

The picture of his mother, too, is like a Dutch 
portrait : — 

"The mother at home quietly placing the dishes on the 

supper-table, 
The mother with mild words, clean her cap and gown, a 

wholesome odor falling off her person'and clothes 

as she walks by." 

With his father there was less instinctive sym- 
pathy, though the following lines must not be 
construed as a literal sketch of Walter Whit- 
man : — 

" The father strong, self-sufficient, manly, mean, angered, 
unjust. 

The blow, the quick loud word, the tight bargain, the 
crafty lure. 

The family usages, the language, the company, the fur- 
niture, the yearning and swelling heart." 

But evidently it was not always calm in the 
carpenter's household, and the yearning hearts 
of the children needed comforting. It may be 
noted that certain sanctions, which have touched 
the early years of many poets with a mysterious 
sense of other- worldlin ess, were quite absent 
here. There were no religious observances of 
any sort in the Whitman household. The father, 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 11 

though a good workman, was restless and dissat- 
isfied, and seems not to have had the knack of 
" gettfng on." 

When Walt was only four, the family mi- 
grated to Brooklyn, thirty miles away, and for 
the next few years they lived in various houses 
on Front, Cranberry, Johnson, and Tillary 
Streets. " " We occupied them, one after the 
other, but they were mortgaged and we lost 
them ; " so wrote the poet in his old age. But 
his memories of Brooklyn were for the most part 
happy, as a boy's should be. The " village," for 
such it remained legally until 1834, had in 1823, 
when the Whitmans moved thither, but seven 
thousand inhabitants. For every purpose of a 
boy, it was like living in the country. The 
younger Whitmans seem to have journeyed often 
back to the old home at West Hills, and to 
other spots in Queens and Suffolk Counties. 
The ocean side of Long Island, with its Great 
South Bay and its atmosphere of storm and 
shipwreck, made an ineffaceable impression upon 
Walt Whitman's mind. But the prevailing spirit 
was one of healthy sport, mingling with the 
half-apprehended landscape sentiment dear to 
boyhood. Here are a few reminiscences from 
Specimen Days: — 

" Inside the outer bars or beach this south bay 
is everywhere comparatively shallow; of cold 



12 WALT WHITMAN 

winters all thick ice on the surface. As a boy I 
often went forth with a chum or two, on those 
frozen fields, with hand-sled, axe and eel-spear, 
after messes of eels. We would cut holes 
in the ice, sometimes striking quite an eel 
bonanza, and filling our baskets with great fat, 
sweet, white-meated fellows. . . . The shores 
of this bay, winter and summer, and my doings 
there in early life, are woven all through L. 
of G." l^Leaves of Grass.l 

One sport which the boy particularly loved 
was the gathering of sea-gulls' eggs in summer, 
on the sand of the great bays. He disliked gun- 
ning and cared little for fishing, but he loved a 
boat, and was never weary of roaming on foot, 
even in very early boyhood, over the wilder 
places of "Paumanok," as the Indians had 
called Long Island. The wide Hempstead plains 
especially fascinated him : " I have often been 
out on the edges of these plains toward sundown, 
and can yet recall in fancy the interminable 
cow-processions, and hear the music of the tin 
or copper bells clanking far or near, and breathe 
the cool of the sweet and slightly aromatic even- 
ing air, and note the sunset." 

But the city, as well as the country, began 
to furnish memorable sights. When Lafayette 
made his triumphal tour of America in 1824, he 
visited Brooklyn, and laid the corner-stone of a 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 13 

public library. Throngs of children crowded 
around the excavation to see the distinguished 
visitor, and Lafayette himself, dismounting from 
his canary-colored coach, picked up the five- 
year-old Walt Whitman, — who was no doubt a 
most chubby and wholesome little fellow, — gave 
him a kiss, and set him in a safe place. Types 
of the coming American aristocracy, so sharply 
different from those of the old world, were soon 
to confront the boy ; for a few years after La- 
fayette's visit, on a sharp, bright January day, 
just below Houston street in New York, he 
saw " a bent, feeble but stout-built very old man, 
bearded, swathed in rich furs, with a great er- 
mine cap on his head, led and assisted, almost 
carried, down the steps of his high front stoop 
(a dozen friends and servants, emulous, carefully 
holding, guiding him) and then lifted and tuck'd 
in a gorgeous sleigh, envelop'd in other furs, for 
a ride. The sleigh was drawn by as fine a team of 
horses as I ever saw. ... I remember the spirited 
champing horses, the driver with his whip, and 
a fellow-driver by his side, for extra prudence. 
The old man, the subject of so much attention, I 
can almost see now. It was John Jacob Astor." * 

Walt Whitman's schooling was but scanty. 
Tn the common schools of Brooklyn, then in 

^ Prose Works, p. 12. 



14 WALT WHITMAN 

their infancy, instruction was limited to reading, 
writing, and arithmetic, — with a little grammar 
and geography. None of his teachers made suf- 
ficient impression upon him to be mentioned by 
name, and he left school forever at the age of 
thirteen. He never learned any language except 
English, in spite of his curious fondness in later 
life for using words borrowed — or sometimes 
invented — from French and Spanish sources. 
But he was fond of reading, and happening to 
enter a lawyer's office as errand boy, he found 
encouragement from his employers, a father and 
two sons named Clarke. "I had," he says, " a 
nice desk and window-nook to myself ; Edward 
C. kindly help'd me at my hand-writing and 
composition, and (the signal event of my life up 
to that time) subscribed for me to a big circu- 
lating library. For a time I now revel'd in ro- 
mance-reading of all kinds; first the Arabian 
Nights^ all the volumes, an amazing treat. Then, 
with sorties in very many other directions, took 
in Walter Scott's novels, one after another, and 
his poetry." 

This agreeable berth was exchanged, after a 
little, for one in a doctor's office. Then, while 
still early in his teens, the boy went to work at 
type-setting in the printing office of the Long 
Island Patriot^ a weekly paper owned by the 
Brooklyn postmaster. Walt, with the other ap- 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 15 

prentices, boarded with the grand-daughter of a 
fellow workman, and liked his new employment. 
He grew rapidly, and at fifteen had nearly a 
man's height and vigor. One may suspect that 
he was a somewhat idle apprentice, for he notes 
" being down Long Island more or less every 
summer, now east, now west, sometimes months 
at a stretch." 

After a while he left the Patriot for the Star, 
Like Franklin and many another young printer, 
he had already begun to feel the itch of compo- 
sition. " The first time I ever wanted to write 
anything enduring," he said in his old age, "was 
when I saw a ship under full sail, and had the 
desire to describe it exactly as it seemed to me." 
He had written some "sentimental bits" for the 
Patriot^ and shortly afterwards " had a piece or 
two in George P. Morris's then celebrated and 
fashionable Mirror^ in New York City. I re- 
member with what half -suppressed excitement I 
used to watch for the big, fat, red-faced, slow- 
moving, very old English carrier who distri- 
buted the Mirror in Brooklyn ; and when I got 
one, opening and cutting the leaves with trem- 
bling fingers. How it made my heart double-beat 
to see my piece on the pretty white paper in 
nice type ! " At sixteen he became the owner of 
a stout volume containing all of Scott's poems ; 
"an inexhaustible mine and treasury" which he 



16 WALT WHITMAN 

cherished for fifty years. He developed a fond- 
ness for debating societies, and at seventeen was 
a member of more than one, in Brooklyn and 
in near-by villages. The theatre fascinated him 
early, and some casual work as a compositor in 
New York gave him opportunity to indulge his 
passion for it. 

About his eighteenth year he became restless 
again, and tried school-teaching in country vil- 
lages in Queens and Suffolk Counties. He 
" boarded round," and thought this one of the 
best experiences of his life. All that is really 
known of Whitman as a school-teacher was gath- 
ered from an interview in 1894 with Charles A. 
Roe,^ who was his pupil in Flushing, Long 
Island, when about ten years of age. Though 
more than half a century had then elapsed, the 
vivid impression made by the ruddy-cheeked, 
clear-eyed, kindly teacher had not faded. It 
must here be summed up briefly. Young Whit- 
man had original ideas, it appears, about teach- 
ing mental arithmetic ; was fond of describing 
objects and incidents to his scholars ; had au- 
thority without severity ; was decidedly serious 
in manner ; was diffident with women and " not 
religious in any way," to the especial regret of a 
friendly mother of four daughters, with whom he 

^ Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers, Philadelphia, April^ 
1895. 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 17 

boarded. He was already reputed to have writ- 
ten poetry. He dressed neatly in a black frock 
coat, was of beautiful complexion and rugged 
health, and spent every possible moment out of 
doors. In short, Mr. Roe reported him as "a 
man out of the average, who strangely attracted 
our respect and affection." 

But the calm and self-reliant young school- 
master, " with ideas of his own," soon felt once 
more the stirrings of an inherited restlessness, 
or perhaps a still deeper instinct that impelled 
him to widen constantly his circle of experience. 
The ancestral life upon a Long Island farm of- 
fered nothing that he cared for. Teaching had 
proved pleasant enough ; what if writing might 
be better still ? He had long since mastered the 
trade of a type-setter j and had tasted the first plea- 
sures of authorship ; and now what more inde- 
pendent and satisfactory calling could there be 
for a vigorous young fellow than that of editor, 
compositor, and distributor of a country newspa- 
per.^ The experiment is best described in his 
own words : — 

" My first real venture was the Long Islander^ 
in my own beautiful town of Huntington, Long 
Island, New York, in 1839. I was about twenty 
years old. I had been teaching country school 
for two or three years in various parts of Suffolk 
and Queens Counties, but liked printing. I had 



18 WALT WHITMAN 

been at it while a lad, and learned tlie trade of 
compositor, and was encouraged to start a paper 
in the region where I was born. I went to New 
York, bought a press and types, hired some little 
"help, but did most of the work myself, including 
the press-work. Everything seemed turning out 
well (only my own restlessness prevented my 
gradually establishing a permanent property 
there). I bought a good horse, and every week 
went all around the country serving my papers, 
devoting one day and night to it. I never had 
happier jaunts — going over to South Side, to 
Babylon, down the South Road, across to Smith- 
town and Comae, and back home. The experi- 
ences of those jaunts, the dear old-fashioned far- 
mers and their wives, the stops by the hayfields, 
the hospitality, the nice dinners, occasional even- 
ings, the girls, the rides through the brush and 
the smell from the salt of the South roads, come 
up in my memory to this day, after more than 
forty years. The Long Islander has stuck it out 
ever since." ^ 

Whitman's childhood was now over. As one 
reviews it, its outward features are clear enough. 
A stout ancestry of mingled strain, winning a 
comfortable living from the soil; surroundings 
of quiet beauty ; a home where there was much 
affection, but few books and scanty culture ; a 

^ Reminiscences written for the Camden, N. J. Press. 



A CHILD WENT FORTH 19 

family habit of migration, tinged with unsuc- 
cess ; a little schooling ; a various apprentice- 
ship, ending in a trade ; then a taste of teach- 
ing, and finally, at twenty, an adventure with 
running a newspaper. In these external condi- 
tions, his life had grown more frankly experi- 
mental with each year. Yet beneath its shifting 
and tentative cover of circumstance a definite 
personality is plainly to be traced. This dark- 
haired, pleasant-faced youth, compacted of Dutch 
calm and English vigor, had a mind and will of 
his own. Tremulously sensitive to the beauty of 
the out-door world, with a romantic nature which 
already reveled in the old faery realm of poetry 
and imagination, he had lived even in boyhood 
a full emotional life. There were some evidences, 
probably unsuspected by himself, of a neurotic 
tendency. " He was a very good, but very 
strange boy," said his mother afterward to 
Colonel Norton. " The time of my boyhood was 
a very restless and unhappy one; I did not 
know what to do," he said once to Grace Gil- 
christ. This is perhaps nothing more than the 
usual restlessness of adolescence. Yet the story 
which Whitman told to Mrs. Anne Gilchrist 
about the extreme nervous terror into which he 
was thrown, in boyhood, by the sight of a man 
falling from a hayrick — "I ran miles away" 
— indicates an excess of emotional endowment," 



20 WALT WHITMAN 

to which the tragic fate of his oldest and young- 
est brothers gives significance. It was a fortu- 
nate instinct that drove him so early into the 
open air and into contact with self-contained, 
strong-muscled men. With something of the 
innate selfishness of a born sentimentalist, he 
was nevertheless a loving son and an affectionate 
brother. He was fond of persons and places and 
the wholesome common experiences. Of formal 
education and training he had almost as little as 
the young Ulysses ; but like him he had self- 
command, shrewdness, patience, and many a 
blind desire in his pagan heart. So he went forth, 
and he was to go very far. 



CHAPTER II 

THE CARESSER OF LIFE 

" In me the caresser of life wherever moving." 
Leaves of Gras^. 

In one of the random, undated scraps of writing 
which Whitman's literary executors have pub- 
lished with such pious care, occurs this memoran- 
dum for a future poem : " A Poem — Theme. 
Be Happy. Going forth, seeing all the beau- 
tiful perfect things." These words suggest the 
motif oi more than one of his productions, and 
they may serve to indicate the spirit of blissful 
vagrancy which dominated his early manhood. 
As we have seen, he had learned the printer's 
trade. Like any mediaeval apprentice enjoying 
his Wanderjahre, he could find employment 
\yhen he was pleased to do so. Though not gifted 
with manual quickness or dexterity, he could 
perform farm work if necessary, and was capa- 
ble, after a fashion, of handling carpenter's 
tools. With this equipment for earning a living, 
he was quite content. He was economically in- 
dependent. To give any hostages to fortune by 
assuming social responsibilities was not in his 



22 WALT WHITMAN 

plan. Indeed, it is impossible to find any traces 
of settled plan in Whitman's career until he was 
well along in the thirties. Certain deep instincts 
had their way with him, and persistent traits of 
character are revealed throughout the casual ex- 
periences of his curiously prolonged youth. But 
conscious purpose there was none, except to 
gratify that " pure organic pleasure " which the 
young Wordsworth tells us that he drank in, even 
at the age of ten, from " beauty old as creation." 
And with Walt Whitman, as with Wordsworth, 
there was the parallel though slowly-shaping im- 
pulse toward some form of literary expression. 

As might have been expected, the youthful 
editor of The Long Islander grew weary of his 
country weekly after a year or two, and his finan- 
cial backers were equally weary of him. He 
drifted back to New York. Here, in 1841, he 
became editor of The Daily Aurora, an organ 
of the Tyler administration. One of his associ- 
ates has pictured him, not without vividness.^ 
Whitman had at twenty-two the look of a man 
of twenty-five, " tall and graceful in appearance, 
neat in attire, and possessed a very pleasing and 
impressive eye and a cheerful, happy-looking 
countenance; He usually wore a frock coat and 
a high hat, carried a small cane, and the lapel 

1 William Cauldwell, in the New York Times. Quoted in 
The Conservator, July, 1901. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 23 

of his coat was almost invariably ornamented 
with 'a boutonniere. . . . After he looked over 
the daily and exchange papers (reaching the den 
he occupied usually between 11 and 12 o'clock), 
it was Mr. Whitman's daily habit to stroll down 
Broadway to the Battery, spending an hour or 
two amid the trees and enjoying the water view, 
returning to the office location at about 2 or 3 
o'clock in the afternoon." Unluckily, the senior 
proprietor of the Aurora, who thought Whit- 
man "the laziest fellow who ever undertook to 
edit a city paper," differed with him upon a 
point of editorial policy, and the engagement 
came to an end. 

But the personable Mr. Walter Whitman, 
with his high hat and light cane and boutonniere, 
was not easily cast down. He was already writ- 
ing regularly for the Tattler, an evening paper. 
What was of far more consequence, he was 
proving an acceptable contributor to the Demo- 
cratic Review, at that time the foremost literary 
journal published in New York. Hawthorne, 
Bryant, Longfellow, Lowell, Thoreau, Whittier 
and Poe were writing for it. Whitman appeared, 
not as a verse-writer, but as a story-teller. Hi s first 
contribution, apparently, was a sketch, "Death 
in the School-Room" (August, 1841). This 
was followed by " Wild Frank's Return " (No- 
vember, 1841), and " Bervance ; or Father and 



24 WALT WHITMAN 

Son " (December, 1841), in a number which 
also contained signed contributions from Bryant, 
Whittier, and Longfellow. Then came " The 
Tomb-Blossoms (January, 1842), " The Last 
of the Sacred Army" (March, 1842), "The 
Child-Ghost; a Story of the Last Loyalist" 
(May, 1842), and a sketch called " The Angel 
of Tears " (September, 1842), which is chiefly 
interesting as proving how very neatly the young 
journalist could play, if need be, upon the flute 
of Edgar Allan Poe. A few lines will serve : — 

" High, high in space floated the angel Alza. 
Of the spirits who minister in heaven Alza is 
not the chief; neither is he employed in deeds 
of great import, or in the destinies of worlds 
and generations. Yet if it were possible for 
envy to enter among the Creatures Beautiful, 
many would have pined for the station of Alza. 
There are a million, million invisible eyes which 
keep constant watch over the earth — each 
Child of Light having his separate duty. Alza 
is one of the Angels of Tears." 

For nearly three years thereafter nothing trace- 
able to Whitman appeared in the Democratic 
Review. But in August, 1845, he published a 
story, " Revenge and Eequital : a Tale of a 
Murderer Escaped," which now appears in his 
Prose Worlcs under the title "One Wicked 
Impulse." 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 25 

Whittier's " The Shoemaker " — one of the 
Songs of Labor series in which he anticipated 
Whitman by ten years in chanting the praises 
of the American workingman — was printed in 
the same issue. In November appeared Whit- 
man's " Dialogue " against Capital Punishment, 
in which the interlocutors are The Majesty of 
the People and A Shivering Convict. " Strangle 
and Kill in the name of God ! O Bible ! what 
follies and monstrous barbarities are defended 
in thy name! " Lowell had already taken the 
same position, his sonnets " On Reading Words- 
worth's Sonnets in Defence of Capital Punish- 
ment " having been published in the Democratic 
Review in May, 1842. The "Dialogue" was 
Whitman's last signed contribution to the Re- 
vieiv, although its thrifty editor reprinted " The 
Last of the Sacred Army," unsigned, in Novem- 
ber, 1851, in spite of its previous appearance, 
over the signature of Walter Whitman, in 1842. 
In September, 1855, as will be seen later, the 
Review honored its old contributor by allowing 
him to write an anonymous and highly favorable 
notice of his own Leaves of Grass} 

Several contributions by Whitman may be 

1 Of the sketches appearing in the Democratic Review, four 
(" Death in the School-Room," "Wild Frank's Return," "The 
Last Loyalist," and " One Wicked Impulse ") are given in the 
Prose Works. The others remain uncollected. 



26 WALT WHITMAN 

found In the files of Brother Jonathan^ a New 
York weekly which flourished during 1842 and 
1843. On July 9, 1842, it reprinted a thin little 
tale, " A Legend of Life and Love," crediting it 
to " Walter Whitman in The Democratic Mag- 
aziner ^ A more interesting contribution was 
Whitman's letter of February 26, 1842, defend- 
ing Dickens — who was then making his first 
American tour — from an attack which had ap- 
peared in the Washington Globe. Under the 
title " Boz and Democracy " Whitman declares : 

" A ' democratic writer,' I take it, is one, the 
tendency of whose pages is to destroy those old 
landmarks which pride and fashion have set up, 
making impassable distinctions between brethren 
of the Great Family. ... I consider Mr. Dickens 
to be a democratic writer. The familiarity with 
low life wherein Mr. Dickens places his readers 
is a wholesome familiarity. ... I cannot lose 
the opportunity of sajang how much I love and 
esteem him for what he has taught me through 
his writings." 

The first volume of the American Review 
(Wiley and Putnam, N. Y., 1845) contained two 
tales by Whitman : " The Boy Lover " ^ (May) 
and " The Death of Wind-foot " (June). " My 
serious wish," he wrote very sensibly in later life, 

^ I do not find this in the Democratic Meview. 
^ Now in the Prose Works. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 27 

" were to have all those crude and boyish pieces 
quietly dropp'd in oblivion." But the zeal of col- 
lectors forbids this, and it is probable that the 
files of New York periodicals during the forties 
will yield other fugitive compositions by Whit- 
man, both in prose and verse.^ 

Once he tried his hand at a novel, which was 
published in November, 1842, as a single issue 
of the New Worlds a weekly story-paper edited 
by Park Benjamin. It was announced as follows : 
" Friends of Temperance Ahoy ! Franklin 
Evans ; or The Inebriate : A Tale of the Times. 
By a popular American author. This novel, 
which is dedicated to the Temperance Societies 
and the friends of the temperance cause through- 
out the United States, will create a sensation, 
both for the ability with which it is written, as 
well as the interest of the subject, and will be 
universally read and admired. It was written 
expressly for the JYew World, by one of the best 
novelists in this country, with a view to aid the 
great work of reform, and rescue young men 
from the demon of Intemperance. The incidents 
of the plot are wrought out with great effect, 
and the excellence of its moral and the beneficial 

1 I have been unable to find the date or original place of 
publication of " The Child and the Profligate," " Lingave's 
"Temptation," " Little Jane" and " Dumb Kate," which ap- 
pear in the Prose Works. 



28 WALT WHITMAN 

effect it will have should interest the friends of 
the Temperance Reformation in giving the Tale 
the widest possible circulation." 

It is to be feared that the friends of the Tem- 
perance Reformation might have been pained if 
they had detected their novelist in the act of 
composition. "He wrote it," says a lifelong 
acquaintance,^ " mostly in the reading room of 
Tammany Hall, which was a sort of Bohemian 
resort, and he afterward told me that he fre- 
quently indulged in gin cocktails while writing 
it, at the ' Pewter Mug,' another resort for Bo- 
hemians around the corner in Spruce Street." ^ 
When the old poet was near his death, he was 
told by an admirer that he had been searching 
far and wide for a copy of Franklin Evans, 
Whitman replied fervently that he " hoped to 
God " that the search would remain unsuccessful. 

In truth none of Whitman's early prose pos- 
sesses any high degree of literary merit. But it 
is marked by a strong ethical sense and especially 
by sympathy with the poor and suffering. 
Though feeble in construction and weakened by 
that tendency to the lachrymose and the melo- 

^ J. G. Schumaker, Esq., in New York Tribune, April 4, 
1892. 

^ It should be added that this friend states explicitly : "In 
all my long acquaintance witji Walter I never heard him make 
use of a profane or indecent word. He was always the gentle- 
man," 



THE CAKESSER OF LIFE 29 

dramatic which few American tales of 1840-1850 
managed to escape, his stories show a hatred of 
cruelty and injustice, and a right-mindedness 
toward the common people, which makes them 
interesting indications of what was going on in 
Whitman's mind. Poe is the only contemporary 
whose style he seems to imitate. " One Wicked 
Impulse " and " The Child and the Profligate " 
are perhaps the most characteristic productions, 
but compared with the vigorous pages of Whit- 
man's later prose the best of this earlier sort 
are but shadows. 

Eeaders naturally turn to his earliest verse 
for some hint of the extraordinary manner which 
was afterward revealed in Leaves of Grass. 
But there is little, if anything, which points that 
way. In the Appendix to the Prose Works four 
of these early poems are given. The " Dough- 
Face Song," signed "Paumanok," and origin- 
ally appearing. Whitman says, in the New York 
Evening Post^^ consists of twelve six-line stanzas 
of brisk political satire, cleverly rhymed. 

" We do not ask a bold brave front; 

We never try that game ; 
'T would bring the storm upon our heads, 

A huge mad storm of shame ; 
Evade it, brothers — ' compromise ' 

Will answer just the same." 

1 The precise date is unknown. From the political refer- 
ences in the poem, it was probably written in 1848. 



30 WALT WHITMAN 

With this poem, as examples of the con- 
ventional versification which Whitman at first 
adopted, belong two poems from Brother Jona- 
than which he did not see fit to reprint. The first 
"appeared on January 29, 1842, and is entitled 
'* Ambition. It opens with eleven lines of correct 
blank verse, describing the somewhat familiar 
figure of a solitary young man who asks himself, 

" Shall I, in time to come, be great and famed ? " 

To this question a cloud-formed shape makes 
answer, in nine quatrains, two of which may 
stand for all: — 

*' At night, go view the solemn stars 
Those wheeling worlds through time the same, 
How puny seem the widest power, 
The proudest mortal name ! 

Think too, that all, lowly and rich, 
Dull idiot mind and teeming sense. 
Alike must sleep the endless sleep, 
A hundred seasons hence." 

Then, in six more lines of good blank verse 
and commonplace philosophising the poem is 
brought to a conclusion. A few weeks later the 
editor of Brother Jo7iaiJian printed a second 
poem by Walter Whitman, "Death of the 
Nature-Lover," accompanied by this prefatory 
note: "The following wants but a half -hour's 
polish to make of it an effusion of very un- 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 31 

common beauty.— Ed." The first two of the 
eight stanzas run thus : — 

" Not iu a gorgeous hall of pride 

Where tears fall thick, and loved ones sigh, 

Wished he, when the dark hour approach'd, 
To drop his veil of flesh and die. 

"Amid the thunder-crash of strife, 

Where hovers War's ensanguined cloud, 

And bright swords flash and banners fly 
Above the wounds and groans and blood." 

The significance of such productions lies not 
so much in their intrinsic value, as in the evi- 
dence they afford of Whitman's mastery of the 
usual measures of English poetry. Critics of \ 
Leaves of Grass have frequently asserted that 
its author, finding himself incompetent to write in 
metre and rhyme, hit upon a mode of expression 
which would hide his weakness as a craftsman. 
But here he is at twenty-three, writing, both in 
blank verse and rhyme, poems that may fairly 
be compared with the average contributions 
of Lowell, N. P. Willis, and Whittier to the 
periodicals of the early forties. 

Of the three remaining poems preserved in the 
Prose Works^ *' Sailing the Mississippi at Mid- 
night," written in 1848 or later, is in conven- 
tional but jerky quatrains. " Wounded in the 
House of Friends," a political piece with a motto 
from the prophet Zechariah, reads like the dis- 



32 WALT WHITMAN 

integrated blank verse of the later Elizabethan 
or Jacobean dramatists. Here is evidently a 
striving for greater freedom than the regular 
ten-syllabled verse affords, yet it is a decadent 
measure, looking backward rather than forward. 
For a hint of any new rhythmical design we 
must turn rather to " Blood-Money," a passion- 
ate anti-slavery poem, with the motto " Guilty 
of the hody and the blood of Christ,'^ 

I 
Of olden time, when it came to pass 
That the beautiful God, Jesus, should finish his work on 

earth, 
Then went Judas, and sold the divine youth, 
And took pay for his body. 

Curs'd was the deed, even before the sweat of the clutch- 
ing hand grew dry ; 
And darkness frown'd upon the seller of the like of God, 
Where, as though earth lifted her breast to throw him 
from her, and heaven refused him, 
He hung in the air, self-slaughter'd. 

The cycles, with their long shadows, have stalked silently 

forward, 
Since those ancient days — many a pouch enwrapping 

meanwhile 
Its fee, like that paid for the son of Mary. 

And still goes one, saying, 

" What will ye give me, and I will deliver this man unto 

you ? " 
And they make the covenant, and pay the pieces of silver. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 33 

II 

Look forth, deliverer, 

Look forth, first-boru of the dead, 

Over the tree-tops of paradise ; 

See thyself in yet continued bonds, 

Toilsome and poor, thou bear'st man's form again, 

Thou art reviled, scourged, put into prison, 

Hunted from the arrogant equality of the rest ; 

With staves and swords throng the willing servants of 
authority. 

Again they surround thee, mad with devilish spite ; 

Toward thee stretch the hands of a multitude, like vul- 
tures' talons. 

The meanest spit in thy face, they smite thee with their 
palms ; 

Bruised, bloody and pinion'd is thy body, 

More sorrowful than death is thy soul. 

Witness of anguish, brother of slaves, 

Not with thy price closed the price of thine image : 

And still Iscariot plies his trade. ^ 

1 In the Prose Works this poem is dated April, 1843, and 
signed "Paumanok." Whitman elsewhere states {Prose 
Works, p. 196) that it first appeared in the New York Tribune. 
But I have before me an envelope endorsed in Whitman's 
handwriting, — " Blood-Money (must have been pub. about 
1852 - or '3)," and containing this poem, clipped from the 
New York Evening Post, and signed, not "Paumanok" but 
" Walter Whitman." Furthermore, this Post clipping has evi- 
dently been used as printer's ' ' copy " for the Prose Works ver- 
sion, since in the sixth line it reads "the seller of a Son of God," 
which has been altered in pencil by Whitman to " the seller of 
the like of God," the reading- which is found in the received 
text of the poem. It would be interesting to know the date of 
the actual first publication. I have been unable to find it. 



34 WALT WHITMAN 

Whitman's early productions are chiefly signifi- 
cant, after all, as proving how slowly he was 
finding or fashioning his distinctive note as a 
writer. But writing was itseK only an incident 
*in a life crowded with sights and experiences 
that stirred the healthy young Long Islander 
with an intoxicating sense of variety and free- 
dom. No reader of his Specimen Days^ can 
fail to share the glow of enthusiasm with which 
he portrays the glories of Broadway, the ferry 
boats hurrying through one of the most pictur- 
esque harbors in the world, and the famous omni- 
buses that used to ply up and down New York's 
central thoroughfare, guided by the " quick-eyed 
and wondrous race " of drivers. 

London or Paris never produced a more gen- 
uine offspring of the pavements than the coun- 
try-bred Walt Whitman. He drank in the spec- 
tacle like a spellbound child. Hour after hour, 
day after day, year in and year out, he sat in 
the pilot houses of the ferry boats, with pilot 
friends whom he recalls lovingly by name, " ab- 
sorbing shows, accompaniments, surroundings." 
His seat was quite as likely to be by the side of 
some ready-tongued driver of a Yellowbird or 
Redbird omnibus, a driver like Broadway Jack, 
Pop Rice, Balky Bill, or Pete Callahan. Upon 
the sidewalk he saw the celebrities of the period : 

^ See particularly, Specimen Days, pp. 11-14. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 35 

Andrew Jackson, Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, 
Walker the filibuster. Or it might be the Prince 
of Wales, Charles Dickens, or, a little later, the 
first ambassadors from Japan. He watched James 
Fenimore Cooper in a courtroom, and called at the 
Broadway 'Journal office to "see its editor, Edgar 
Allan Poe, about a piece of Whitman's which Poe 
— " very kindly and human, but subdued, per- 
haps a little jaded" — had recently published. ^ 

Such an enraptured gazer at the human pro- 
cession could not fail to be fascinated by the 
theatre. At the old Park Theatre, and the Bow- 
ery, the Broadway and Chatham Square theatres, 
he saw Henry Placide and Fanny Kemble, Sher- 
idan Knowles, Ellen Tree, the younger Kean, 
Macready, the elder Booth, Forrest, Charlotte 
Cushman, and many another king and queen of 
the footlights. In these years he heard all the 
Italian operas then in vogue, as rendered by 
such singers as Alboni, Grisi, and Mario. As a 
newspaper man. Whitman's name was on the 
free list of the theatres, and the boyish passion 
for declamation and lyricism, which had so re- 
stricted a field in the country debating societies, 
now thrilled his big sensuous body and set his 
soul in a tumult. 

As he rode up or down the Bowery with Balky 
Bill and Pete Callahan he would " declaim some 

1 I have been unable to identify this contribution. 



36 WALT WHITMAN 

stormy passage from Julius Ccesar or Richard 
(you could roar as loudly as you chose in 
that heavy, dense, uninterrupted street-bass)." 
Sometimes these declamations had a far different 
accompaniment, for in mild weather Whitman 
went regularly each month to Coney Island, " at 
that time a long, bare, unfrequented shore, which 
I had all to myself, and where I loved after bath- 
ing, to race up and down the hard sand, and 
declaim Homer or Shakspere to the surf and sea- 
gulls by the hour." 

While contact with many varieties of human 
nature was moulding Whitman's sympathies, his 
constant attendance upon the great dramas and 
operas was the chief contribution to his aesthetic 
education. These singers and actors were to have 
no small share in shaping the phrases and 
rhythms of his later verse. He made some effort, 
also, to become acquainted with the classics of 
literature. Although the deficiencies of his boy- 
hood education left him deaf to the meaning of 
all languages but English, one who had learned 
to love Sir Walter Scott and the Arabian 
Nights was bound to explore some of the en- 
chanted lands of poetry. His adventures are best 
told in his own words. 

" At intervals, summers and falls, I used to 
go off, sometimes for a week at a stretch, down 
in the country, or to Long Island's seashores — 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 37 

there, in the presence of outdoor influences, I 
went over thoroughly the Old and New Testa- 
ments, and absorb'd (probably to better advan- 
tage for me than in any library or indoor room 
— it makes such difference where you read,) 
Shakspere, Ossian, the best translated versions 
I could get of Homer, Eschylus, Sophocles, the 
old German Nibelungen, the ancient Hindoo 
poems, and one or two other masterpieces, 
Dante's among them. As it happen'd, I read 
the latter mostly in an old wood. The Iliad 
(Buckley's prose version,) I read first thoroughly 
on the peninsula of Orient, northeast end of 
Long Island, in a shelter'd hollow of rocks and 
sand, with the sea on each side. (I have won- 
dered since why I was not overwhelm'd by those 
mighty masters. Likely because I read them, as 
described, in the full presence of Nature, under 
the sun, with the far-spreading landscape and 
vistas, or the sea rolling in.) " ^ 

To represent Whitman, however, either at this 
time or at any later period, as a systematic student 
of books would be misleading. His methods of 
reading were mainly casual and impressionistic, 
and he gave to newspapers and magazines the 
greater portion of his attention. He read widely 
in the periodical field, clipped or tore out what 
he liked best, and often made marginal com- 

1 " A Backward Glance," in Leaves of Grass, p. 441. 



38 WALT WHITMAN 

ments upon it. " I discover that I need a thor- 
ough posting-up in what Rome and the Romans 
were," is one of these annotations. His interest 
in Oriental history was stimulated by frequent 
visits to a New York museum of Egyptian anti- 
quities. Indeed, he went anywhere and every- 
where that his curiosity led him. He frequented 
shops and factories to talk with the workmen ; 
a habit which he shared, by the way, with his 
noted townsman, Henry Ward Beecher. Though 
no church-goer, he liked the oratory of Beecher 
and other divines, and would sit under them upon 
occasion. He listened admiringly to Wendell 
Phillips, Garrison, John P. Hale, and other anti- 
slavery speakers. In the later phases of his 
political sympathies, he went on the stump for 
Polk, as he had for Van Buren, and he is said 
to have been a delegate to the Convention of Free 
Soilers in Buffalo in August, 1848. He min- 
gled freely in many sorts of social gatherings in 
Brooklyn and New York. " I have been with 
him often in the society of ladies," testifies Mr. 
Schumaker,^ " and I never knew of any woman, 
young or old, but thought him a most agreeable 
gentleman of great culture." So thought the 
habitues of Pfaff s famous restaurant on Broad- 
way, where Mr. Whitman enjoyed for a while the 
amiable distinction of being the only member of 

1 The New York Tribune, April 4, 1892, as cited above. 




PORTRAIT USED IN 1855 EDITION 

From an engraving by Samuel Hollyer after a daguerreotype 

taken by Gabe Harrison, Brooklyn 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 39 

that Bohemian circle who was " never tipsy and 
never broke." At a later period he did, indeed, 
borrow from his literary friends at Pfalf 's, but 
he took, as he gave, with a royal ease that still 
delights the memory of some of his surviving 
creditors. There was something in his bland, 
leisurely, magnetic presence, even then, that 
made for companionship ; and with almost any 
men and women he was ready to fleet the time 
carelessly as in the golden world. His faithful 
friend, John Burroughs, writing his Notes on 
Walt Whitman as Poet and Person, in 1867, 
judged it discreet to say : " Through this period 
(1840-1855), without entering into particulars, 
it is enough to say that he sounded all experi- 
ences of life, with all their passions, pleasures 
and abandonments. He was young, in perfect 
bodily condition, and had the city of New York 
and its ample opportunities around him. I trace 
this period in some of the poems of ' Children 
of Adam ' and occasionally in other parts of his 
book, including ' Calamus.' " 

Endless leisureliness, curiosity, tolerance, mark 
these dateless years in New York. The record of 
them is now written ineffaceably in Whitman's 
verse, but there are no data for following his 
fortunes month by month, or scarcely year by 
year. " Weeks grew months, years," as they did 
in Browning's " Statue and the Bust," but the 



40 WALT WHITMAN 

sense of brave adventure and the secret glories 
of a youthful heart did not fade. 

At twenty-seven or twenty-eight — the precise 
date is uncertain — Whitman became editor of 
the Brooklyn Eagle. The Eagle was a daily of 
four small pages only, and the editor's responsi- 
bilities were not arduous. Whitman lived with 
his father and mother, on Myrtle Street, in a 
little wooden house still standing. He used to 
stroll very slowly — as was his life-long habit 
— from his home to the office, which was near 
Fulton Ferry, a mile and a half away. He left 
his desk almost every afternoon for another stroll 
or a swim, frequently taking some journeyman 
printer from the composing-room as his compan- 
ion. One of his successors ^ upon the staff of the 
Eagle has given a pleasant account of his edito- 
rials. They have the usual unpent freedom of 
the village newspaper; passing from praise of 
fresh air, bathing and exercise, to attacks upon 
capital punishment, slavery, dueling, and the 
war spirit. They describe a visit to ships just an- 
chored in the East River, or they voice a distrust 
of trade unions. Everywhere they exhibit a com- 
mendable local pride, a strong national senti- 
ment and a wholesome sympathy for the rights . 
of the common man. The style is slovenly, and the 

^ C. M. Skinner, in the Atlantic Monthly for November, 
1903. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 41 

thought quite without distinction. As a spokes- 
man of Democratic politics Whitman possessed 
a good-natured honesty rather than any partisan 
fire, and after being "pretty handsomely beaten" 
by the Whigs in a city election, he announces 
serenely that the first and largest reason for the 
defeat " is that we did n't get enough votes by a 
long shot ! " 

This connection with the Eagle lasted through- 
out the year 1847, but early in 1848 he made a 
memorable shift. The occasion for it is best de- 
scribed in his own words. ^ "For two years (as 
editor of the Eagle) I had one of the pleasant- 
est sits of my life — a good owner, good pay, 
and easy work and hours (it came out about 
three every afternoon). The troubles in the 
Democratic party broke forth about those times 
(1848-49), and I split off with the Radicals, 
which led to rows with the boss and ' the party ' 
and I lost my place. Being now out of a job, I 
was offered impromptu (it happened between 
the acts one night in the lobby of the old Broad- 
way Theatre, near Pearl Street, New York city) 
a good chance to go down to New Orleans on 
the staff of the Crescent^ a daily to be started 
there with plenty of capital behind it, in oppo- 
sition to the Picayune. One of the owners, Mr. 
McClure, who was North buying material, met 

1 In the first number of the Camden, N. J., Courier. 



42 WALT WHITMAN 

me walking in the lobby, and though that was 
our first acquaintance, after fifteen minutes' talk 
(and a drink) we made a formal bargain, and 
Mr. McClure paid me $200. down to bind the 
contract and bear my expenses to New Orleans. 
I started two days afterward; had a good lei- 
surely time, as the paper was n't to be out in 
three or four weeks. I enjoyed my journey and 
Louisiana venture very much." 

His companion upon the journey was his 
favorite brother "Jeff," then fifteen years of 
age. They went by way of Pennsylvania and 
Virginia, crossing the Alleghenies, and taking 
a steamer down the Ohio and Mississippi rivers. 
The Mexican war had just closed, and New 
Orleans was full of the bustle and color of re- 
turning soldiery. In the St. Charles Theatre 
Whitman had a chance to see General Taylor: 
"a jovial, old, rather stout, plain man, with a 
wrinkled and dark yellow face," who reminded 
him of Fenimore Cooper. In Whitman's brief 
memoranda of his New Orleans experiences 
his editorial labors for the Crescent have no 
mention except that the situation was "rather a 
pleasant one." It is unlikely that they were 
more severe than those upon the Aurora and 
the Eagle. But he always remembered regret- 
fully the old French markets on Sunday morn- 
ings, where a great mulatto woman used to give 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 43 

him coffee more delicious than he ever drank 
afterwards. He lingers affectionately, and with 
the sensuousness of a naive nature, upon the 
" exquisite wines," " the perfect and mild French 
brandy," and the " splendid and roomy and lei- 
surely barrooms" of the St. Charles and St. 
Louis hotels. He loved to wander upon the 
levees, and to talk with the boatmen. Some- 
times, in the ceaseless quest for new sensations, 
he went on Sundays to the old Catholic Cathe- 
dral in the French quarter, a district where he 
was in the habit of promenading. After a few 
months, however, "Jeff" grew homesick and 
found the climate unfavorable. The wandering 
brothers took passage northward by a Mississippi 
steamer, and made a roundabout journey home- 
ward by way of Chicago and the Great Lakes, 
stopping at Niagara Falls, and finally reaching 
New York in June. 

Whitman was now in his thirtieth year. The 
sojourn in the South and t'he glimpse of what 
was then the West widened his outlook in many 
ways, and confirmed him in the pride of Ameri- 
can nationality. If a man is at heart a nomad it 
makes little difference to him whether he wan- 
ders over a Concord pasture, returning to his 
home at nightfall, or gazes upon the Father of 
Waters and upon our vast inland seas. But for 
Whitman's future role of poetic interpreter of 



44 WALT WHITMAN 

American life in its totality, the long journey- 
away from Manhattan and Paumanok was sig- 
nificant. There were other changes in him, too, 
that must now be noticed, — new horizons open- 
ing in the inner life. 

Mr. Burroughs's words, already quoted, about 
Whitman's sounding " all pleasures and abandon- 
ments," were written forty years ago. In the case 
of almost any other person they would be suffi- 
ciently specific for the purposes of literary bio- 
graphy. But the controversy over certain phases 
of Whitman's writings has inevitably raised cer- 
tain questions as to his own conduct. He has 
been grossly misjudged in many ways, in default 
of any evidence, and now that certain facts have 
become clear, they should, I think, be plainly 
stated. 

When Whitman's English friend and ad- 
mirer, J. A. Symonds, first read " Calamus," — a 
group of poems celebrating the intimate friend- 
ship of men for men, — he was troubled by some 
lines, and his familiarity with certain passages 
of Greek literature increased his discomfort. 
He wrote to Whitman expressing concern, and 
Whitman, shocked at a misinterpretation of 
which he had not dreamed, wrote frankly in 
reply concerning his own early relations with 
women. This letter, dated August 10, 1890, in 
Whitman's seventy-second year, has been pub- 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 45 

lished in part.* The following sentences are suf- 
ficiently explicit : — 

"My life, young manhood, mid-age, times 
South, etc. have been jolly bodily, and doubtless 
open to criticism. Though unmarried I have had 
six children — two are dead — one living South- 
ern grandchild, fine boy, writes to me occasion- 
ally — circumstances (connected with their for- 
tune and benefit) have separated me from inti- 
mate relations." 

When this letter was first made public, many 
of Whitman's stanch friends of the later fifties 
and the sixties refused to credit its statements, 
preferring to believe that the old man had been 
romancing. But it had long been known, to a 
smaller group of his Camden friends, that Whit- 
man was the father of children, and that he had 
been visited, in his old age, by a grandson. To 
one of these friends he promised, while on his 
death-bed, to tell the whole story, but the time 
for explanation never came. 

In one sense, comment upon this phase of 
Whitman's life is as superfluous as it is painful. 
Sins against chastity commonly bring their own 
punishment. But in our ignorance of all the 
precise facts concerned in these early entangle- 

1 By Edward Carpenter in the London Reformer, February, 
1902. This article now forms a chapter of Carpenter's Bays 
with Walt Whitman, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1906. 



46 WALT WHITMAN 

inents, we may wisely bear in mind some traits 
of his character about wiiich there is no reason- 
able doubt. One of these traits was an unfailing 
outward respect for women. A daily companion 
•of Whitman in Washington tells me that he 
never heard him utter a word that could not 
have been used to his mother. There is over- 
whelming testimony that for thirty years there- 
after his conversation, though often blunt enough, 
was scrupulously chaste. There is also abundant 
evidence that from 1862 onward his life was 
stainless so far as sexual relations were concer- 
ned. The long and bitter controversy over the 
decency of a few of his poems has led many 
critics to assume that they were dealing with 
a libertine. But diligent inquiry among Whit- 
man's early associates in Brooklyn, New York, 
and New Orleans has never produced any 
evidence that he was known to be a companion 
of dissolute women. What woman or women bore 
his children, what unforeseen tides of passion 
or coils of circumstance swept and encircled him 
for a while, may never be known. The episode 
might indeed be passed over with a reluctant 
phrase or two by his biographers, if it were not 
for the part it played in the origins of Leaves 
of Grass. 

For no poet can " sound all experiences of 
life, with all their passions, pleasures and aban- 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 47 

donments," and leave his imagination behind 
him when he takes the phmge. If Walt Whit- 
man were really, as his friend John Swinton 
once described him, "a troglodite pure and sim- 
ple" (i. e. a " primitive" or "cosmic" type of 
man) literature would not need to concern itself 
with whatever appetites were sated in his cave. 
An Ajax may lead a Tecmessa to his tent and be- 
come neither a worse nor a better swordsman. 
But when a Goethe, a Burns or a David takes 
his Tecmessa home, there are more subtle tricks 
of imagination and of will to be reckoned with. 
Whitman's wonderful book, Leaves of Grass, is 
the reflection of an inner illumination, of a mys- 
tical sense of union with the world, and this in 
turn had its reinforcement, if not its origin, in 
sexual emotion. The book was a child of pas- 
sion. Its roots are deep down in a young man's 
body and soul : a clean, sensuous body and a 
soul untroubled as yet by the darker mysteries. 
But to conceive of Walt Whitman as an habit- 
ual libertine, even in his youth, is to misun- 
derstand his nature. For any kind of pleasure, 
says Mr. Chesterton in a recent essay,^ there is 
required " a certain shyness, a certain indeter- 
minate hope, a certain boyish expectation. 
Purity and simplicity are essential to passions, — 
yes, even to evil passions. Even vice demands a 

1 G. K. Chesterton, Heretics, p. 109. 



48 WALT WHITMAN 

sort of virginity." The shy boy who shrank from 
the obscenity of the Brooklyn street-corners, who 
sheltered himself instinctively from any rude jar 
to his sensibilities, was in due time the very 
man to be carried away by a tumult of sexual 
ecstasy, to glorify nakedness, and to declare that 
nothing is common or unclean. That first mod- 
esty, then the " jolly bodily " phase, with its 
slow subsiding wave of tenderness toward the 
body, and finally the long chastity and seren- 
ity of the clean-minded old age, all belong to- 
gether as integral elements of a certainj:ype of 
man. ^ 

When Whitman returned from the South, 
there seemed at first to be but little change in 
him. " He was the same man he had been, 
grown older and wiser," says his brother George.^ 

Full-grown at fifteen, he was now, at thirty, de- 
cidedly gray of hair and beard. He continued 
to live with his father and mother, paying board 
whenever he had the money. For a while, in 
1850-51, he interested himself with launching 
another newspaper, the Brooklyn Freeman^ a 
Free-Soil weekly, afterward a daily. His polit- 
ical sympathies, reacting from his earlier Demo- 
cratic affiliations, gradually turned to the party 
of " Free Soil, Free Speech, Free Labor and Free 

i In Be Walt Whitman. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 49 

Men," which was afterward merged into the 
new Republican party.^ 

" I guess it was about those years " says 
his brother George,^ " he had an idea he could 
lecture. He wrote what mother called barrels 
of lectures. We did not know what he was 
writing. He did not seem more abstracted than 
usual. He would lie abed late, and after get- 
ting up would write a few hours if he took 
the notion — perhaps would go off the rest of the 
day. We were all at work — all except Walt. " 
This project of lecturing was one to which Whit- 
man kept recurring, to the end of his life. It 
guided at intervals his desultory reading, and 
seemed to promise an opportunity for that per- 
sonal impress upon other men which his nature 
had now begun to crave. The earliest lecture of 
which there is any record was delivered before 
the Brooklyn Art Union, March 31, 1851. It 
was printed in the Brooklyn Daily Advertiser 
of April 3, 1851. Only a few sentences appear 

^'Voices from the Press, a, volume published in New York 
in 1850, made up of contributions by printers and journalists, 
contained Whitman's " Tomb Blossoms." In the " Notices of 
Contributors '' prefaced to the book there is a brief account of 
Walter Whitman, closing- with the words : " Mr. Whitman is 
an ardent politician of the radical democratic school, and lately 
established the Daily Freeman in Brooklyn, to promulgate 
his favorite ' Free Soil,' and other reformatory doctrines." 

2 In Re Walt Whitman. 



50 WALT WHITMAN 

in the Prose Worlcs.^ The opening paragraphs 
are interesting in their evident detachment from 
the pressing concerns of American life. 

" Among such a people as the Americans, 
viewing most things with an eye to pecuniary 
profit — more for acquiring than enjoying or 
well developing what they acquire — ambitious 
of the physical rather than the intellectual; a 
race to whom matter-of-fact is everything, and 
the ideal nothing — a nation of whom the steam- 
engine is no bad symbol — he does a good work 
who, pausing in the way, calls to the feverish 
crowd that in the life we live upon this beauti- 
ful earth there may after all be something vaster 
and better than dress and the table, and business 
and politics. 

" There was an idle Persian hundreds of 
years ago who wrote poems, and he was accosted 
by one who believed more in thrift. ' Of what 
use are you ? ' inquired the supercilious son of 
traffic. The poet turning plucked a rose and 
said. ' Of what use is this ? * ' To be beautiful, 
to perfume the air,' answered the man of gains. 
' And I ', responded the poet,' am of use to per- 
ceive its beauty and to smell its perfume.' 

" It is the glorious province of arts and of all 
artists worthy of the name, to disentangle from 
whatever obstructs it and nourish in the heart 

1 Prose Works, p. 371. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 51 

of man the germ of the perception of the truly- 
great, the beautiful and the simple." 

After a description of the Creation, he con- 
tinues : — 

" For just as the Lord left it remains yet the 
beauty of His work. It is now spring. Already 
the sun has warmed the blood of this old yet 
ever youthful earth and the early trees are bud- 
ding and the early flowers beginning to bloom. 
There is not lost one of earth's charms. Upon 
her bosom yet, after the flight of untold cen- 
turies, the freshness of her far beginning lies 
and still shall lie. With this freshness — with 
this that the Lord called good, the artist has to do 
— and it is a beautiful truth that all men con- 
tain something of the artist in them. And per- 
haps it is sometimes the case that the greatest 
artists live and die, the world and themselves 
alike ignorant what they possess. Who would 
not mourn that an ample palace of surpassingly 
graceful architecture, filled with luxuries and 
gorgeously embellished with fair pictures and 
sculpture, should stand cold and still and vacant 
and never be known and enjoyed by its owner ? 
Would such a fact as this cause you sadness ? 
Then be sad. For there is a palace to which the 
courts of the most sumptuous kings are but a 
frivolous patch and though it is always waiting 
for them, not one in thousands of its owners ever 



62 WALT WHITMAN 

enters there with any genuine sense of its gran- 
deur and glory. 

" To the artist, I say, has been given the com- 
mand : ' Go forth into all the world and preach 
the gospel of beauty.' The perfect man is the 
perfect artist and it cannot be otherwise. For in 
the much that has been said of nature and art 
there is mostly the absurd error of considering 
the two as distinct. Rousseau, himself, in reality 
one of the most genuine artists, starting from his 
false point ran into his beautiful encomiums upon 
nature and his foolish sarcasms upon art." 

Then follows a description, quite unwarranted 
by any historical evidence, of the death-bed of 
Rousseau, a writer in whom the lecturer felt a 
strong interest, and whose genius offers, as will 
be pointed out later, many striking parallelisms 
to Whitman's.^ From this fictitious death-bed 
scene, the lecturer passes to a consideration of 
the conception of Death in Greek art, and thence 
to a panegyric of the refined and artistic dignity 
of Greek life, — drawing his material, as he 
naively states, from " a lecture given the other 
evening at a neighboring city." The contrast 
between this perfect ideal of man and the con- 

^ A manuscript translation of several pages of the Contrat 
Social, in Whitman's handwriting, though certainly not made 
by Whitman himself, and dating from the late forties or early 
fifties, was discovered among the poet's papers by Dr. Bucke. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 53 

ventional American of 1851 then inspires this 
sarcastic passage, which reveals how far Whit- 
man had already gone on the road that led 
straio-ht from the tall hat and boutonniere of 
1840 to the flannel shirt and tucked-in trousers 
of 1855: 

" Then see him in all the perfection of fash- 
ionable tailordom — the tight boot with the high 
heel ; the trousers big at the ankle, on some rule 
inverting the ordinary ones of grace ; the long, 
larire cuffs, and thick stiff collar of his coat — 
the swallow-tailed coat on which dancing masters 
are inexorable ; the neck swathed in many bands 
giving support to the modern high and pointed 
shirt collar, that fearful sight to an approaching 
enemy — the modern shirt collar, bold as Colum- 
bus, stretching off into the unknown distance — 
and then, to crown all, the fashionable hat, be- 
fore which language has nothing to say because 
sight is the only thing that can begin to do it 
justice — and we have indeed a model for the 
sculptor." 

Finally, with a sound oratorical instinct, the 
lecturer asserts that heroic action exhibits " the 
highest phases of the artist spirit." 

" Talk not so much then, young artist, of the 
great old masters who but painted and chiseled. 
Study not only their productions. There is a still 
better, higher school for him who would kindle 



64 WALT WHITMAN 

his fire with coal from the altar of the loftiest 
and purest art. It is the school of all grand ac- 
tions and grand virtues, of heroism, of the deaths 
of captives and martyrs — of all the mighty 
deeds written in the pages of history — deeds of 
daring and enthusiasm and devotion and forti- 
tude. Eead well the death of Socrates, and of a 
greater than Socrates. Read how slaves have 
battled against their oppressors — how the bul- 
lets of tyrants have, since the first king ruled, 
never been able to put down the unquenchable 
thirst of man for his rights. 

" In the sunny peninsula where art was trans- 
planted from Greece and generations afterward 
flourished into new life, we even now see the 
growth that is to be expected among a people 
pervaded by a love and appreciation of beauty. 
In Naples, in Rome, in Venice, that ardor for 
liberty which is a constituent part of all well- 
developed artists and without which a man 
cannot be such, has had a struggle — a hot and 
baffled one. The inexplicable destinies have 
shaped it so. The dead lie in their graves ; but 
their august and beautiful enthusiasm is not 
dead : — 

" Those corpses of young men, 
Those martyrs that hung from the gibbets, 
Those hearts pierced by the gray lead, 
Cold and motionless as they seem 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 55 

Live elsewhere with undying vitality ; 

They live in other young men, O kings, 

They live in brothers again ready to defy you. 

They were purified by death ; 

They were taught and exalted. 

Not a grave of those slaughtered ones 

But is growing its seed of freedom, 

In its turn to bear seed. 

Which the wind shall carry afar and re-sow, 

And the rain nourish. 

Not a disembodied spirit 

Can the weapons of tyrants let loose 

But it shall stalk invisibly over the earth 

Whispering, counseling, cautioning. 



" I conclude here, as there can be no true artist 
without a glowing thought of freedom, — so free- 
dom pays the artist back again many fold, and 
under her umbrage Art must sooner or later 
tower to its loftiest and most perfect propor- 
tions." 

Strong as was Whitman's impulse, at this 
time and later, toward a direct oral expression 
of the thoughts that dominated him, nothing 
came of the lecturing scheme. With a serene 
indifference to the mere manner of making a 
living, he joined his father — a full-lipped, ob- 
stinate-eyed, puzzled man, now in his sixties — 
in building and selling small wooden houses in 
the outskirts of the rapidly growing city of 
Brooklyn. John Burroughs tells me that he 



/ 



56 WALT WHITMAN 

does not see how Walt could ever have handled 
saw and hammer skillfully enough to make him 
an acceptable carpenter. Yet he continued for 
three or four years, on and off, to work at the 
new calling. Local conditions just then made 
house-building a lucrative venture, and his bro- 
thers thought that Walt now had " his chance." 
But a St. Paul supporting himself by tent-making 
while his mind brooded upon the new Gospel 
was not more capable than Whitman of combin- 
ing manual employment with spiritual preoccu- 
pation. Very deliberately, as was his manner in 
all things, this ruminative and unpractical car- 
penter began to j^lan an extraordinary thing, — a 
book which should embody himself and his coun- 
try. All that he had experienced was to be a part 
of it ; the life which he had hitherto caressed cas- 
ually, as one touches now the cheek and now the 
hand of the beloved, was to yield itself wholly ; 
to lose, as it were, its own individual existence, 
and to reappear as a Book, but a Book with all 
the potencies of life so coursing in it that it 
should seem not so much a Book as a Man. 

It was this Book that he was really building, 
as he sauntered back and forth to his day's work, 
dinner-pail in hand, and often with a copy of 
Emerson's Essays in his pocket, to read at noon- 
time. But he was not so absorbed in the construc- 
tion of a new kind of poetry as to be quite indif- 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 57 

ferent to what was passing around him. Always 
quickly concerned with whatever made for the 
comfort, happiness and freedom of the ordinary- 
citizen, the book-loving carpenter found much 
to condemn in the city ordinances of Brooklyn. 
He wrote in 1854 a memorial to the Common 
Council and Mayor, in behalf of a freer munici- 
pal government and against Sunday restrictions.^ 
This memorial is not only excellent in spirit, 
but it states with vigorous common-sense cer- 
tain principles of municipal administration which 
still need emphasis. A few characteristic pas- 
sages may well be given here. 

"The mere shutting off from the general 
body of the citizens of the popular and cheap 
conveyance of the city railroad, the very day 
when experience proves they want it most, and 
the obstinate direction of the whole executive 
and police force of Brooklyn into a contest with 
the keepers of public houses, news depots, cigar 
shops, bakeries, confectionery and eating saloons 
and other places, whether they shall open or close 
on Sunday, are not in themselves matters of all- 
engrossing importance. The stoppage of the 
Rail cars causes much vexation and weariness 
to many families, especially in any communica- 
tion to and from East Brooklyn, Williamsburgh, 

1 Printed in the Brooklyn Star, Oct. 20, 1854. I am indebt- 
ed to Mr. John Burroughs for a copy. 



68 WALT WHITMAN 

Greenpoint, Bushwick, New Brooklyn, Bedford 
and Greenwood ; and both stoppages do no 
earthly good. But beneath this the blunder rises 
from something deeper. These restrictions are 
part of a radical mistake about the policy and 
lawful power of an American City Govern- 
ment. . . . 

" Shallow people, possessed with zeal for any 
particular cause, make it a great merit to run to 
and fro after special prohibitions that shall fix 
the case and emasculate sin out of our houses 
and streets. Alas, gentlemen, the civilized world 
has been overwhelmed with prohibitions for many 
hundred years. We do not want prohibitions. 
What is always wanted is a few strong-handed, 
big-brained, practical, honest men at the lead of 
affairs. The true friends of the Sabbath and 
of its purifying and elevating influences, and of 
many excellent physical and other reforms that 
mark the present age, are not necessarily those 
who complacently put themselves forward and 
seek to carry the good through by penalties 
and stoppages and arrests and fines. The true 
friends of elevation and reform are the friends 
of the fullest rational liberty. For there is this 
vital and antiseptic power in liberty, that it 
tends forever and ever to strengthen what is 
good and erase what is bad. 

" For the City or State to become the overseer 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 59 

and dry nurse of a man and coerce him, any- 
further than before mentioned, into how he must 
behave himself and when and whither he must 
travel and by what conveyance, or what he shall 
be permitted to use or dispose of on certain days 
of the week, and what forced to disuse, would be 
to make a poor thing of a man. — In such mat- 
ters the American sign-posts turn in the same 
direction for all the grades of our governments. 
The citizen must have room. He must learn to 
be so muscular and self-possessed, to rely more 
on the restrictions of himself than any restric- 
tion of statute books or city ordinances or police. 
This is the feeling that will make live men and 
superior women. This will make a great ath- 
letic spirited city of noble and marked character, 
with a reputation for itself wherever railroads 
run and ships sail and newspapers and books are 
read. . . . 

" I have also, gentlemen, with perfect respect 
to remind you and through you to remind others, 
including those, whoever they may be, who de- 
sire to be your successors, or to hold any office, 
prominent or subordinate in the city govern- 
ment, of the stern demand in all parts of the Re- 
public, for a better, purer, more generous and 
comprehensive administration of the affairs of 
cities ; a demand in which I, in common with 
the quite entire body of my fellow citizens 



\ 



60 WALT WHITMAN 

and fellow taxpayers of Brooklyn, cordially 
join. 

" We believe the mighty interests of so many 
people, and so much life and wealth should be 
far less at the sport or dictation of caucuses and 
cabals. ... I do not think so highly of what is to 
be done at the capitols of Washington or Albany. 
Here it is enough for us to attend to Brooklyn. 
There is indeed no better scope for practically 
exhibiting the full sized American idea, than in 
a great, free, proud American city. Most of our 
cities are huge aggregates of people, riches and 
enterprise. The avenues, edifices and furniture 
are splendid ; but what is that to splendor of 
character? To encourage the growth of trade 
and property is commendable, but our politics 
might also encourage the forming of men of 
superior demeanor and less shuffling and blow- 
ing. 

" Marked as the size, numbers, elegance and 
respectability of Brooklyn have become, a more 
lasting and solid glory of this or any community 
must always be in personal and might be in 
municipal qualities. Out of these in ancient 
times, a few thousand men made the names of 
their cities immortal. The free and haughty 
democracy of some of those old towns, not one 
third our size of population rated themselves on 
equal terms with powerful kingdoms, and are 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 61 

preserved in literature, and the admiration of the 
earth." 

Then follows a glowing description of the city 
of Brooklyn, and its possibilities of development 
under a proper civic pride. The letter closes 
with this characteristic utterance : — 

" After all is said, however, the work of es- 
tablishing and raising the character of cities of 
course remains at last in their original capacity 
with the people themselves. Strictly speaking 
when the proper time comes it comes. Perhaps 
the citizens have no right to complain of being 
hampered and cheated and overtaxed and in- 
sulted, for they always hold the remedy in their 
own hands and can apply it whenever they like. 
I am not the man to soft-soap the people any 
more than I do office holders, but this I say for 
them at all times that their very credulity and 
repeated confidence in others are organic signs 
of noble elements in the National character. 

Walter Whitmaj^." 

So far as I am aware, this is the last signed 
composition of Whitman's previous to the pub- 
lication, in the following July, of Leaves of 
Grass. In its earnest, lofty conception of the 
value of the individual man, it may serve to 
symbolize the close of a long and random chapter 



62 WALT WHITMAN 

of experience. The boyish, dandified editor of 
the Long Islander, so avid of emotional stim- 
ulus, so prodigal of vitality, had become a quiet, 
slow-footed, gray-bearded workingman. More 
than a dozen years had passed since his name 
had first been printed in the table of contents of 
the Democratic Review, side by side with those 
of Whittier, Bryant, and Longfellow. These writ- 
ers, together with Hawthorne, Lowell, and other 
magazinists of the forties, had slowly strength- 
ened their hold upon the public. Whitman had 
been forgotten. The newer magazines. Harper'' s, 
founded in 1850, and Putnam^ s, founded in 1853, 
were already cultivating a younger generation of 
authors. 

To the restless fermentation of thought that 
marks the decade of 1840-1850 Whitman had 
in fact contributed nothing, though he had ab- 
sorbed much. The religious world, the intellec- 
tual, social, and economic worlds, had been pro- 
foundly shaken by movements that are associated 
in England with the names of such men as New- 
man and Pusey, Carlyle, Dickens and Kingsley, 
Cobden and Bright. The common passion of such 
spirits as these was the improvement of man. 
In America, too, the decade had been marked 
by crusades of every sort. The Transcenden- 
talist belief in the truths that escape the bounds 
set by the external senses had spread far beyond 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 63 

Concord and Cambridge. Communism and so- 
cialism were in the air, as well as abolitionism 
and perfectionism. Emerson and Lowell have 
left witty descriptions of the universal flux of 
doctrine, the cult of fads of every kind, "the 
sans-culottism of the forties." Brisbane and 
Greeley had been expounders of Fourierism. 
Men as variously endowed as Hawthorne, Ripley 
and Curtis had sought a common refuge at Brook 
Farm. Many of the " Disciples of the Newness " 
took, like Whitman himself, to the open road. 
"Some went abroad and lived in Europe and 
were rarely heard from ; others dwelt at home 
and achieved nothing ; while others, on the con- 
trary, had the most laborious and exacting ca- 
reers. Others led lives morally wasted, whether 
by the mere letting loose of a surge of passion ill 
restrained, or by the terrible impulse of curiosity 
which causes more than half the sins of each 
growing generation, and yet is so hard to dis- 
tinguish from the heroic search after knowledge. 
I can think of men among those bred in that 
period, and seemingly under its full influence, 
who longed to know the worst of life and knew 
it, and paid dearly for their knowledge ; and 
their kindred paid more dearly still. . . . Others 
vanished, and are to this day untraced ; and yet 
all were but a handful compared with the major- 
ity which remained true to early dreams while 



64 WALT WHITMAN 

the world called tliem erratic, and the church 
pronounced them unredeemed." ^ 

But before Whitman laid down his carpenter's 
tools, the reaction against Transcendentalism — 
that American back-current of the wave of Eng- 
lish and German Romanticism — had already set 
in. Both the movement and the reaction may 
be curiously traced in the careers of three young 
men who were all born in the same year as Whit- 
man, 1819. W. W. Story, who had married at 
twenty-three, practised law and written successful 
law books for six years, suddenly abandoned a 
brilliant professional career, and with the slight- 
est preparatory training sailed for Italy in 1847 
to become an artist. An artist, but an exile, he 
remained. Charles A. Dana, the famous editor 
of the New York Smi^ was in 1841 passing the 
griddle-cakes at Brook Farm, and contributing 
religious sonnets to Margaret Fuller's Dial. But 
by 1847 he had joined Ripley, another ship- 
wrecked mariner from Brook Farm, upon the. 
relatively solid ground of the New York Tri- 
hune. James Russell Lowell, another son of 
1819, was crossed in love and meditating suicide 
in the very year that Walt Whitman was buying 
type for the Long Islander. But in the next 

1 Thomas Wentworth Higginson in the Atlantic Monthly, 
January, 1904 : " The Sunny Side of the Transcendental 
Period," now reprinted in Pari of a Man's Life. 



THE CARESSER OF LIFE 65 

fifteen years Lowell had weathered his Storm 
and Stress period, written successful volumes of 
poetry, grown a trifle weary of the society of re- 
formers, and qualified himself for a professorship 
at Harvard. 

In purely intellectual eagerness and brilliancy 
each of these three young men surpassed Walt 
Whitman. At thirty-six each one of them had 
outlived certain phases of Transcendental enthu- 
siasm and had settled into a definite career. But 
Whitman, a true child of his age, though an ob- 
stinate one, seemed to be prolonging his child- 
hood indefinitely. Like Thackeray, another " ca- 
resser of life " until thirty-six, he had thus far 
been outstripped by many less enduring but 
swifter rivals. And yet the deeper^ fact is that 
Whitman was never really competing with other 
men for any of the tangible prizes. He was quest- 
ing. No Romanticist wandering in search of the 
magic Blue Flower ever carried a heart more 
tremulously eager for all " the beautiful perfect 
things." Some of them he found and some of 
them he missed. Upon the road that he chose to 
travel he met with much good and much evil. 
His nature, which was sound and sweet rather 
than delicate and austere, tranquilly received 
both good and evil, as into an ample and mo- 
therly embrace. For there was a good deal of the 
woman in Walt Whitman, as well as a good deal 



66 WALT WHITMAN 

of the man. To find what he had experienced 
and brooded over, while his Transcendental con- 
temporaries had gone on, leaving him apparently 
far behind them, we must turn to Leaves of 
Grass. 



CHAPTER III 

LEAVES OF GRASS 

" Like a font of type, poetry must be set up over again con- 
sistent with American, modern and democratic institutions." — 
Walt Whitman to a New York Herald reporter in 1888. 

" Yes, Walt often spoke to me of his books. I would tell 
him * I don't know what you are trying- to get at ! ' And this 
is the idea I would always arrive at from his reply. All other 
people in the world have had their representatives in litera- 
ture : here is a great big race with no representatives. He 
would undertake to furnish that representative. It was also 
his object to get a real human being into a book. This had 
never been done before." — JBeter Doyle, street-car conductor 
and railroad man, in 1895. 

"A page with as true and inevitable and deep a meaning 
as a hillside, a book which Nature shall own as her own flower, 
her own leaves; with whose leaves her own shall rustle in 
sympathy imperishable and russet ; which shall push out with 
the skunk-cabbage in the spring. I am not offended by the 
odor of the skunk [-cabbage] in passing by sacred places. I 
am invigorated rather. It is a reminiscence of immortality 
borne on the gale. O thou partial world, when wilt thou know 
God ? I would as soon transplant this vegetable to Polynesia 
or to heaven with me as the violet." — Thoreau's Journal, May, 
1850. Unpublished until 1906. 

In the spring of 1855 Whitman dropped his 
saw and hammer and began to set up with his 



68 WALT WHITMAN 

own hands the type for his book, using the print- 
ing establishment of Andrew and James Rome 
at the corner of Cranberry and Fulton Streets, 
Brooklyn. The first drafts of his " copy " had 
been written in theatres or ferry-boats and om- 
nibuses, or wherever he happened to be, but it 
had been revised and elaborated — as he after- 
ward told his friend Dr. Bucke — no less than 
five times. " I had great trouble," he says in 
Specimen Days^ " in leaving out the stock 
' poetical ' touches, but succeeded at last." 

In no sense, therefore, was Leaves of Grass 
an impromptu. It was the result of a purpose 
which had been slowly forming for years. One of 
the clearest of Whitman's many formulations of 
this purpose is found in "A Backward Glance : " 

" After continued personal ambition and effort, 
as a young fellow, to enter with the rest into com- 
petition for the usual rewards, business, political, 
literary, etc., — to take part in the great melee^ 
both for victory's prize itself and to do some 
good — after years of those aims and pursuits, I 
found myself remaining possess'd, at the age of 
thirty-one to thirty-three, with a special desire 
and conviction. Or rather, to be quite exact, a 
desire that had been flitting through my previous 
life, or hovering on the flanks, mostly indefinite 
hitherto, had steadily advanced to the front, de- 
fined itself, and finally dominated everything else. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 69 

This was a feeling or ambition to articulate and 
faithfully express in literary or poetic form, and 
uncompromisingly, my own physical, emotional, 
moral, intellectual and aesthetic Personality, in 
the midst of, and tallying, the momentous spirit 
and facts of its immediate days, and of current 
America — and to exploit that Personality, iden- 
tified with place and date, in a far more candid 
and comprehensive sense than any hitherto poem 
or book." ' 

This passage reminds one of the famous open- 
ing sentences of the Confessions of Rousseau, 
a book, by the way, which Whitman did not 
like, in spite of his admiration for its author. 
But there is no real reason for thinking that 
Whitman consciously imitated any of the mas- 
ters of literary autobiography. No path like his 
had been blazed through the American forest, 
at least, and he struck into it with all the sen- 
sations of a pioneer. 

" Write a book of new things " is one of the 
entries in his notebook of this period. Here are 
some other significant jottings : " Make no quot- \ 
ations and no reference to any other writers." 
— "No, I do not choose to write a poem on a 
lady's sparrow, like Catullus — or on a parrot, 
like Ovid — nor love songs like Anacreon — 
nor even 2 . . . like Homer — nor the siege of 

^ Leaves of Grass, p. 434. 

2 The dots represent blanks in the MS. 



70 WALT WHITMAN 

Jerusalem like Tasso — nor . . . nor ... as 
Shakespeare! What have these themes to do 
in America ? or what are they to us except as 
beautiful studies, reminiscences ? All those are 
good — they are what they are — I know they 
should not have been different — I do not say 
I will furnish anything better — but instead I 
will aim at high immortal works — American, 
the robust, large, manly character — the perfect 
woman — the illustriousness of sex, which I will 
celebrate. Shakespeare and Walter Scott are 
indeed the linmers and recorders — as Homer 
was one before, and the greatest, perhaps, of 
any recorder. All belong to the class who de- 
pict characters and events and they are masters 
of the kind. I will be also a master after my 
own kind, making the poems of emotion, as 
they pass or stay, the poems of freedom, and the 
expose of personality — singing in high tones 
Democracy and the New World of it through 
These States.^ 

It is a mistake to interpret such note-book 
passages as these as "tall talk" merely. A 
poet who chooses, as did Wordsworth, to take 
himself with uniform seriousness is sure to ex- 
cite the occasional smile, and there is cause 
enough for humor in Whitman's penciled com- 
ment upon an article on the dangers of egotism 

1 Dr. Bucke notes : " Probably written before 1850." 



LEAVES OF GRASS 71 

(in Graham! 8 Magazine^ March, 1845) : " See 
above and BewareP But Whitman was fully 
as conscious as Wordsworth of the exalted na- 
ture of the poet's function, and, like him again, 
had devoted close attention to the theory of 
poetic style. Among his "Rules for Composi- 
tion," written early in the fifties, he mentions : 
" A perfectly transparent plate-glassy style, 
artless, with no ornaments, or attempts at orna- 
ments, for their own sake. . . . Take no illustra- 
tions whatever from the ancients or classics . . . 
nor from the royal and aristocratic institutions 
and forms of Europe. Make no mention or 
allusion to them whatever except as they relate 
to the new, present things — to our country — 
to American character or interests. . . . Com- 
mon idioms and phrases — Yankeeisms and vul- 
garisms — cant expressions, when very pat only." 
In a similar passage of later date, he exclaims : 
" No ornamental similes at all — not one : per- 
fect transparent clearness sanity and health are 
wanted — that is the divine style — O if it can 
be attained — " 

Concerningi, originality and eccentricity he 
notes : 

"The originality must be of th6 spirit and 
show itself in new combinations and new mean- 
ings and discovering greatness and harmony 
where there was before thought no greatness. 



72 WALT WHITMAN 

The style of expression must be carefully purged 
of anything striking or dazzling or ornamental 
— and with great severity precluded from all 
that is eccentric." In commenting upon his 
i*eading of Ossian he warns himself : " Don't 
fall into the Ossianic hy any chance.''^ As he 
passes from the discussion of the mere externals 
of style to its psychologic basis he is no le s 
interesting, in view of his own subsequent pei- 
f ormance : " The best poetry is simply that which 
has the perfectest beauty — beauty to the ear, 
beauty to the brain, beauty to the heart, beau y 
to the time and place." 

And finally, there is among Whitman's pre- 
paratory notes for Leaves of Grass a superb 
passage which might have stood in Emerson's 
American Scholar address of 1837. Its open- 
ing sentences are these : — 

" Understand that you can have in your writ- 
ing no qualities which you do not honestly enter- 
tain in yourself. Understand that you cannot 
keep out of your writing the indication of the 
evil or shallowness you entertain in yourself. 
If you love to have a servant stand behind your 
chair at dinner, it will appear in your writing ; 
if you possess a vile opinion of women, or if you 
grudge anything, or doubt immortality, these will 
appear by what you leave unsaid more than by 
what you say. There is no trick or cunning, no 



LEAVES OF GRASS 73 

art or recipe by which you can have in your writ- 
ing that which you do not possess in yourself." ^ 
It was out of this deep self-scruti&y, and after 
this long period of meditation upon the nature 
and method of the poet's task, that Leaves of 
Grass came into being. As poetry, it was, like 
the Lyrical Ballads, neither better nor worse 
■or the critical theorizing that preceded it ; but 
■ as a document in literary history it gains in dig- 
nity and significance. 

The physical appearance of the book was 
inique enough. It was a tall, thin quarto, bound 
in dark green cloth ornamented with flowers. 
Upon both covers and upon the back appeared 
Ihe title. Leaves of Grass, in decorated gilt let- 
tering. The page was of generous proportions, 
measuring eleven inches by seven and three 
quarters. Save for a single reference on page 
29 to "Walt Whitman, an American," and for 
the copyright notice " by Walter Whitman," the 
author's name was not given ; the title page 
earing simply the words Leaves of Grass, 
Brooklyn, New York : 1855. Opposite the title 
■age, however, was a steel engraving of the 
Luthor,^ from a daguerreotype taken by G. Har- 

1 Printed in Prose Works, Camden Edition, vol. vi, pp. 39-42. 

2 The engraving was made in McRae's establishment, by 
S. Hollyer. The original plate, slightly retouched, is still 
used by Small, Maynard and Co. for their standard edition of 

Leaves of Grass. 



74 WALT WHITMAN 

rison in 1854. Few portraits of authors have 
become mor^ famous. From the top of the black 
slouch hat to the knees, every line is in keeping 
with an admirable pose. The left hand is thrust 
into the trousers pocket, the right hand rests 
easily upon the hip. The top button of the 
flannel shirt is open, showing a massive throat. 
The head, inclined slightly toward the left, is 
that of a meditative, handsome man, with full 
steady eyes, sensuous, wistful mouth, and a 
close-trimmed beard, already gray. If he were 
really " one of the roughs," this portrait might 
have been used to disprove it. It presents a 
poet in workman's clothes, and the flannel shirt 
and slouch hat are as clearly symbolical as 
George Fox's leathern breeches, or the peasant 
dress of Count Tolstoi. 

Of the few persons who examined the first 
edition of Leaves of Grass, it is not likely 
that many stopped to read the Preface, — a 
ten-page essay set in double columns. Yet the 
book is scarcely to be understood without it, 
and in the long list of dissertations by poets 
upon the nature of poetry, it would be difficult 
to point to one more vigorous and impassioned, 
although much of it is as inconsecutive as the 
essays of Emerson which helped to inspire it. 
Its general theme is the inspiration which the 
United States offers to the great poet. Amer- 




COVER OF 1855 EDITION 



LEAVES OF GRASS 75 

ica does not repel the past, he declares, although 
the life has gone out of the past. Here, in this 
teeming nation of nations, is the fullest poet- 
ical nature known to history. The genius of the 
United States is best shown in the common 
people, and the American poet must express 
their life. He must love the earth and sun and 
the animals, despise riches, give alms to every- 
one that asks, stand up for the stupid and 
crazy. He must reexamine all that he has been 
told at school or church or in any book, and 
dismiss whatever insults his own soul. Thus 
his very flesh becomes a great poem. He isi 
at one with the universe, and feels the harmony 
of things with man. He brings all things to 
bear upon the individual character. The " art 
of art" is simplicity; it is to speak in litera- 
ture with the perfect rectitude of animals and 
trees. Thus the great poet is marked by uncon- 
straint and defiance of precedent . He sees that 
the soul is as great as anything outside of 
it ; that there is no antagonism between poetry 
and science, or between the natural and the 
supernatural, — everything being miraculous 
and divine. General laws rule, and these make 
for happiness. . The poet, furthermore, must be a 
champion of political liberty. He must recognize 
that the actual facts of the American republic 
are superior to fiction and romance. Candor 



76 WALT WHITMAN 

and absence of trickery characterize him. His 
true thrift is to secure the things of the soul. 

"Beyond the independence of a little sum 
laid aside for burial money, and of a few clap- 
*boards around and shingles overhead on a lot 
of American soil owned, and the easy dollars 
that supply the year's plain clothing and meals, 
the melancholy prudence of the abandonment 
of such a great being as man is, to the toss 
and pallor of years of money-making, with all 
their scorching days and icy nights and all their 
stifling deceits and underhand dodgings, or in- 
finitesimals of parlors or shameless stuffing while 
others starve . . . and all the loss of the bloom 
and odor of the earth and of the flowers and 
atmosphere and of the sea and of the taste of the 
women and men you pass or have to do with 
in youth or middle age, and the issuing sickness 
and desperate revolt of a life without elevation 
or naivete, and the ghastly chatter of a death 
without serenity or majesty, is the great fraud 
upon modern civilization." . . . 

The prudence of the great poet, therefore, re- 
cognizes that the judgment day is here and now. 
He must " flood himself with the immediate age." 
But after all, the final test of poems is their per- 
manence ; they are a beginning rather than an 
ending. The work of the priests is done. Every 
man shall henceforth be his own priest, finding 



LEAVES OF GRASS 77 

his inspiration in the real objects of today, in 
America. The English language — " the speech 
of the proud and melancholy races and of all 
who aspire " — is to be the chosen tongue. The 
poems distilled from other poems will probably 
pass away, but the soul of the nations will ad- 
vance half way to meet the soul of its true poets. 
And then Whitman closes with a sentence, which 
in view of his own long waiting for recognition 
is not without pathos : " The proof of a poet is 
that his country absorbs him as affectionately as 
he has absorbed it." 

Some of the more lyrical passages of this 
eloquent prelude were afterwards remodeled 
into verse for " By Blue Ontario's Shore " and 
other poems. It now appears in his Prose 
Worhs^ but was never again prefaced to subse- 
quent editions of Leaves of Grass. Even the 
brief summary just given reveals how delib- 
erately and with what ardor of faith Whitman 
gave himself to the audacious task of becoming 
in his own person the representative poet of 
his country. Whatever he lacked, it was not 
self-confidence. 

The opening words of the new evangel were 
curious enough : — 

" I celebrate myself, 

And what 1 assume you shall assume, 

For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you. 



78 WALT WHITMAN 

" I loafe and invite my soul, 

I lean and loafe at my ease . . . observing a spear of 
summer grass." 

.These individualistic but not very promising 
lines introduced a piece filling forty-five pages, 
or considerably more than half the volume, not 
counting the preface. Like the eleven shorter 
pieces which followed it, it had no title. The 
words Leaves of Grass were, in fact, repeated at 
the head of each of the first six pieces, the remain- 
ing six being separated only by a printer's orna- 
mental line. But this long first poem — which in 
the second edition was entitled " Poem of Walt 
Whitman, an American," and in the third and 
subsequent editions " Song of Myself " — was 
fairly typified by that unashamed " I celebrate 
myself." For it was about the man Walt Whit- 
man, — his body and his soul, his ecstasies in the 
remembered presence of beauty, his passionate 
sympathies for men and women,, his curiosity and 
transport with the eternal human spectacle. He 
identifies himself with this spectacle, now in one 
aspect of it, now in another : becoming in imagi- 
nation the hounded slave, the fireman, the soldier 
and sailor, the priest. Everywhere he beholds 
God : out of death he sees life arising ; he loses 
for the moment personal identity to become one 
with the cloud and the grass. He is at once self- 
intoxicated and world-intoxicated ; he cries out, 

y 



LEAVES OF GRASS 79 

now with inarticulate rapture and agony, now 
with a full-toned Benedicite, omnia opera Dom- 
ini/ Praise Him and magnify Him forever ! 
Like William Blake, he asserts that " Every- 
thing is good in God's eyes," and he would not 
have shrunk from Blake's corollary, " Collective 
man is God." The common grass of the field is 
to him the hieroglyphic symbol of the unutter- 
able mystery that lies close about us. The reve- 
lation of the mystery comes through the passion- 
ate sense of union with the beloved ; and in this 
physical ecstasy the very atmosphere, the wind 
and the leaves and the brown earth have a share, 
so that they in turn excite or soothe the aching 
senses of the man. As by the ebb and flow of 
the tide, the universal frame of things thus be- 
comes flooded with personality : in one moment 
things are made anthropomorphic, and in the 
next men and women are de-personalized into 
scarcely sentient flesh. Never was there a 
stranger pantheism, — flexible, reversible at 
will. The "Song of Myself" is full of sexual 
imagery, and the constant shifting of the word 
" I " from its individual to its symbolic mean- 
ing — that is, from the actual Walt Whitman 
to the typical human being whom the "I" is 
often used to represent — frequently gives this 
sexual imagery a startling character. The hu- 
man body is stripped bare ; and in the emo- 



80 WALT WHITMAN 

tional frenzy which masters the poet, the conven- 
tions, and occasionally the decencies, are clean 
forgotten. Yet these passages, offensive as they 
vill always be to the fastidious, — " it is as if the 
beasts spoke," said Thoreau, — sprang from a 
profound sense of the germinal forces of life. It 
was a Titanic endeavor to express the spirit in 
terms of the flesh. It was predestined to partial 
failure, not only because that feat is so insuper- 
ably difficult, but also because Whitman was 
after his fashion a philosopher and prophet as 
well as a poet, and this was a task calling for 
pure poetry. 

The briefer pieces ^ which followed the " Song 
of Myself " were not so much separate poems 
as variations upon the theme announced in the 
first. They presented different aspects of human 
experience as envisaged by the typical person- 
ality already portrayed. In this sense they pre- 
sent a certain structural unity, and their com- 
parative brevity made them more easy of ap- 
prehension. " The Sleepers," for example, could 
not have presented any real difficulties to the 
reader who recalled Professor Teufelsdrbck's 

1 Using the present titles, these were " A Song for Occupa- 
tions," " To Think of Time," " The Sleepers," " I Sing the 
Body Electric," " Faces," "Song of the Answerer," " Europe," 
" A Boston Ballad," " There was a Child Went Forth," " Who 
Learns my Lesson Complete," " Great are the Myths." 



LEAVES OF GRASS 81 

strange vision from his tower, published in Sar- 
tor Resartus more than twenty years before. 

In fact, a reading public which for a score of 
years had been familiar with many types of 
Romantic and Transcendental extravagance, and 
had already begun to react from them, could not 
have been so much amazed by the contents of 
Leaves of Grass — aside from its frank nudities 
— as by its eccentricities of form. The wide 
pages of the 1855 quarto gave Whitman's long 
lines a dignity unapproached in any subsequent 
edition. Yet many of these lines were obviously 
sentences of prose, .which, like the three opening 
lines already quoted, contained no hint of poetry. 
There was no use of rhyme or stanza. There 
was no uniformly recognizable type of metre, 
although many passages fell into regular metri- 
cal beats. Rhythm could indeed be felt, as in 
all emotional writing whether in prose or verse ; 
but the rhythms of Leaves of Grass had been 
more cunningly modulated and disguised than 
any one then suspected. To most readers, no 
doubt, the poetical intention of the work was 
more apparent than the poetical pattern. The 
raw material of poetry was flung in with a liberal 
hand, — emotion, imagination, and many a sing- 
ing word or phrase. Cadences rich and melan- 
choly, periods full and orotund, made themselves 
instantly recognized by the attentive reader. 



82 WALT WHITMAN 

But tlie tunes were chiefly those of passionate 
speech rather than of verse. Sometimes there 
were memories and fragments of well-known 
metrical forms. 

" Downhearted doubters, dull and excluded " 

is a line of pure Anglo-Saxon four-stressed allit- 
erative verse. Many passages are composed in 
a sort of ruined blank verse, like that employed 
by late Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists ; 
a measure so broken by pauses, by fragmentary 
lines, by warfare between metrical and logical 
accent, by sheer willfulness, as to seem of the 
iambic five-stressed type only through echo and 
reminiscence. Again, there are single lines of 
dactylic hexameter : — 

" The married and unmarried children ride home to their 
Thanksgiving dinner." 

" I rise ecstatic through all and sweep with the true grav- 
itation." 

Sometimes this dactylic beat continues through 
more than the normal six intervals, as in the sec- 
ond of the following lines : — 

" I laughed content when I heard the voice of my little 

captain, 
We have not struck, he composedly cried, we have just 

begun our part of the fighting. " 

Frequently the ear catches the measure of the 
six-foot anapest which Tennyson used so often 



LEAVES OF GRASS 83 

in his later poetry, — either in its normal form, 
as when Whitman writes : — 

"And I know that the hand of God is the elder hand of 
my own ; " 

" And reached till you felt my beard and reached till you 
held my feet;" 

or disguised by substitution, as 

" Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths." 

It was evident that, however freely Whitman 
made use of lines or paragraphs of sheer prose, 
the closing cadences of most of the poems had 
been constructed with the utmost care. Very 
characteristic are these final lines : — 
" Smile, for your lover comes ! " 
" It is nearer and further than they." 
"And that was a jet black sunrise." 

Yet the rhythmical structure of Leaves of 
Grass is scarcely to be apprehended through 
the metrical analysis of single lines. Whitman 
composed — and in this respect, at least, he 
resembled the great masters of blank verse — 
with reference to the group, or paragraph of 
lines, and not merely to the single unit. If read 
aloud, page after page, the general rhythmic 
type makes itself felt. It is highly individual, 
and yet it is clearly related to other well-recog- 
nized modes of impassioned literary expression. 



84 WALT WHITMAN 

On one side it touches the "prose poetry" 
of Carlyle and Emerson, De Quincey and Poe, 
— writers with whom Whitman was familiar, 
and some of whom he had imitated in his earlier 
productions. Passages from Sartor Resartus 
and from Emerson's Essays have frequently 
been rearranged typographically, without any 
verbal alteration whatever, so as to look and 
sound like passages from Leaves of Grass. It 
is well known that Ruskin, for example, brought 
this rhythm of " prose poetry " so near to actual 
metre, that the transposition of a few words, 
and the addition or subtraction of a syllable 
here and there would turn his prose into verse. 
William Cairns has pointed out in the London 
Chronicle how easily the following passage from 
Ruskin's Notes on Turner resolves itself into 
hexameters : — 

" ' Morning breaks as I write, along those 
Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless 
and gray beneath the rose of the moorlands, 
veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, 
and the long lawns by the lake shore. Oh, that 
some one had but told me in my youth, when all 
my heart seemed to be set on these colors and 
clouds, that appear for a little while, and then 
vanish away, how little my love of them would 
serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in 
the dews of morning should be completed; and 



I 



• i 



LEAVES OF GRASS 85 

all my thoughts should be of those whom, by 
neither, I was to meet more.' 

" ' Morning breaks as I write, o'er the Coniston Fells, and 
the level, 

Motionless mists lie gray beneath the rose of the moor- 
lands, 

Veiling the lower woods, the lake, and the slumbering 
village. 

Oh, had some friend in the days when my heart, in youth- 
ful emotion, 

Seemed to be set on these colors and clouds which appear 
but to vanish. 

Warned me how little my love of their fast-fading beauty 
would serve, when 

Deep and profound over woodland and lake in the dews 
of the morning, 

Rested a silence complete ; and the thoughts which beset 
me should ever 

Dwell on those I should never meet more, or by lake or 
by woodland.' " 

The ease of this transition from skillful, if 
dangerous, prose to mediocre verse proves the 
delicacy of Ruskin's ear, and the sharp aesthetic 
differentiation between rhythmical effect and 
metrical effect. 

Again, the heightened passages of oratory 
tend, in proportion to their impassioned quality, 
to fall into regular stress. The natural orators 
to whom Whitman loved to listen were fond of the 
heavily accented periods, which, like the cadences 
of prose poetry, approximate, without quite reach- 



86 WALT WHITMAN 

ing, metrical regularity. Often, indeed, in ora- 
tors of florid taste, — precisely as in the pathetic 
passages of Dickens, — the rhythm slips over into 
unconscious iambics. Whitman's friend, Robert 
G. IngersoU, a well-known popular orator, once 
described the old classic myths, in a glowing 
sentence which has been printed ^ without change 
as verse : — 

" They thrilled the veins of Spring with tremulous de- 
sire ; 
Made tawny Summer's billowed breast the throne and 

home of Love ; 
Filled Autumn's arms with sun-kissed grapes and gath- 
ered sheaves ; 
And pictured Winter as a weak old king, 
Who felt, like Lear, upon his withered face, 
Cordelia's tears." 

Whitman utilized freely the characteristic ef- 
fects of both " prose poetry " and oratory, but he 
varied these effects not only with prose rhythms, 
but with the tunes of lyric poetry. He admitted, 
furthermore, his indebtedness to music as sug- 
gesting rhythmical ^variations. He told Mrs. 
Fanny Eaymond Ritter that more of his poems 
were actually inspired by music than he himself 
could remember. He frequently compared his 
interweaving of lyric with descriptive passages 
to the alternating aria and recitative of an ora- 
torio. That his senses were peculiarly responsive 
^ By Michael Monahan, in The Papyrus. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 87 

to all suggestions of movement seems clear. 
Professor F. N. Scott ^ notes " his delicate sus- 
ceptibility to certain modes of motion and se- 
quences of sound," particularly the free, swaying, 
" urging," motions of the ferry-boat, the railroad 
train, the flight of birds ; and, among sounds, 
those of the wind, the locusts in the tree-tops 
and the sea.^ 

In endeavoring to analyze his own metrical 
system Whitman selected the analogy of the 
waves. In a striking self-criticism, later to be 
quoted at length, he declared : — 

" He dismisses without ceremony all the or- 
thodox accoutrements, tropes, verbal haberdash- 
ery, ' feet ' and the entire stock in trade of. 
rhyme - talking heroes and heroines and all the 
lovesick plots of customary poetry, and con- 
structs his verse in a loose and free metre of his 
own, of an irregular length of lines, apparently 
lawless at first perusal, although on closer ex- 
an^ination a certain regularity appears, like the 
recurrence of lesser and larger waves on the sea- 

1 In an unpublished paper entitled "A Note on Walt Whit- 
man's Prosody." 

2 An interesting supplement to this is Horace Traubel's 
note about Whitman's friendships : " He affected pilots, deck- 
hands, transportation men, almost in mass the creatures of 
movement^ Paul Elmer More, in a critical essay on Whitman, 
remarks that the most constant and characteristic of his quali- 
ties is the sense of ceaseless indistinct motion. 



88 WALT WHITMAN 

shore, rolling in without intermission, and fit- 
fully rising and falling." ^ 

" Mahe this more rhythmical " is one of the 
admonitions written in Whitman's notebook dur- 
ing the Leaves of Grass period. That sentence 
is typical of the unending labor with which he 
wrought at the cadences of his long irregular 
lines, until they suited his ear. He was making 
careful notes upon English prosody at the same 
time, and knew something of what he was reject- 
ing, in his striving after a greater freedom and 
" naturalness." Whitman's impatience with the 
real or supposed restraints of formal art coin- 
cided, in fact, with the instinct for the " return 
to nature " which had already been potent for 
more than a generation. William Blake, for ex- 
ample, in the preface to one of those Prophetic 
Boohs which he composed in a language that 
was neither verse nor prose, declared : " When 
this verse was first dictated to me I consider'd a 
Monotonous Cadence like that used by Milton 
& Shakspeare, & all writers of English Blank 
Verse, derived from the modern bondage of 

^ Compare Professor Scott's independent description, in the 
paper already quoted. " The Whitmanian line consists, like 
the prose sentence, of an advancing and retreating wave. He 
varied the length of these waves, varied the speech rhythm to 
coincide or conflict with the routine scansion, introduced mi- 
nor waves and impulses and used alliteration and refrain. . . . 
He is fairly regular in observing his own prosodic rules. " 



LEAVES OF GRASS 89 

Ehyming to be a necessary and indispensible part 
of the verse. But I soon found that in the 
mouth of a true Orator, such monotony was not 
only awkward, but as much a bondage as rhyme 
itself. I therefore have produced a variety in 
every line, both of cadences & number of sylla- 
bles. Every word and every letter is studied and 
put into its fit place: the terrific numbers are 
reserved for the terrific parts, the mild & gentle 
for the mild & gentle parts, and the prosaic for 
inferior parts : all are necessary to each other. 
Poetry Fetter'd Fetters the Human Race ! " ^ 

This was doctrine after Whitman's own heart, 
and it was more widely accepted in the middle 
of the nineteenth century, both in England and 
America, than most present-day readers suspect. 
Among the New England Transcendentalists 
strict poetic form was often looked upon as a 
barrier, rather than an aid to expression. The 
private journals of Thoreau and Emerson are 
full of rhapsodical passages, the first drafts for 
poems, which illustrate a metrical and rhythmical 
lawlessness that was in the very air, although 
the classical training of Thoreau and Emerson 
doubtless made them hesitate to print these 
fresh, formless transcripts of emotional experi- 

1 Blake's Poetical Works, edited by John Sampson, Oxford 
1905, p. 327. 



90 WALT WHITMAN 

ence. ^ There were at least two books, widely read 
during the fifties and on the shelves of many a 
family that did not own a Shakespeare, which 
seemed to prove that conventional poetic form 
'was a negligible element in securing an emo- 
tional effect. One was Macpherson's Poems of 
Ossian^ which Whitman had declaimed by the 
seashore in his youth, and which he read through- 
out his life. The prefatory dissertation upon 
Macpherson's skill as a translator asserts : — 

" The measured prose which he has employed 
possesses considerable advantages above any sort 
of versification he could have chosen. While it 
pleases and fills the ear with a variety of harmon- 
ious cadences, being, at the same time, freer from 
constraint in the choice and arrangement of words, 
it allows the spirit of the original to be exhibited, 
with more justness, force and simplicity." ^ This 
was from the pen of the " elegant " Hugh Blair, 
Professor of Belles Lettres at Edinburgh. 

A more cogent example of the popular success 
then attained by a composition lacking rhyme, 
metre, and indeed rhythm — except such as in- 
heres in its Biblical phraseology — was presented 

^ See the notes to the Centenary Edition of Emerson's 
Poems, pp. 171, 242, 247. The MSS. of unfinished poems by 
Sidney Lanier illustrate the same impulse. 

2 Poems of Ossian. Boston : Phillips, Sampson & Co., 1849, 
p. 180. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 91 

to Whitman mTm^ipev^s I^roverhialJF*hilosophy. 
Tiresome as they seem to-day, those jejune pages 
certainly satisfied the aesthetic requirements of 
countless readers who felt that they were read- 
ing " poetry." Take, for instance, this passage, 
which illustrates the enumerative method which 
Whitman loved.^ 

" Where are the nobles of Nineveh, and mitred rulers of 

Babylon ? 
Where are the lords of Edora, and the royal pontiffs of 

Thebais ? 
The golden Satrap, and the Tetrarch, — the Hun, and the 

Druid, and the Celt ? 
The merchant princes of Phoenicia, and the minds that 

fashioned Elephanta ? 
Alas, for the poet hath forgotten them ; and lo ! they are 

outcasts of Memory ; 
Alas, that they are withered leaves, sapless and fallen 

from the chaplet of fame. 
Speak, Etruria, whose bones be these, entombed with 

costly care, — 
Tell out, Herculaneum, the titles that have sounded in 

those thy palaces, — 
Lycian Zanthus, thy citadels are mute, and the honour of 

their architects hath died ; 
Copan and Palenque, dreamy ruins in the West, the forest 

hath swallowed up your sculptures ; 
Syracuse, — how silent of the past ! — Carthage, thou art 

blotted from remembrance ! 

^ Tupper's Proverbial Philosophy. Boston : Phillips, Samp- 
son & Co., 1854, p. 142. Other interesting- parallelisms with 
Whitman's methods may be found on pp. 17, 27, 77, 130, 147, etc. 



92 WALT WHITMAN 

Egypt, wondrous shores, ye are buried in the sandhill of 
forgetfulness ! " 

A far more striking model of rhythmical prose 
masking as poetry was also at hand. Samuel 
Warren, the author of the Blackwood novel Ten 
Thousand a Year, which was immensely popu- 
lar on both sides of the Atlantic, published in 
1851 a " Lyrical Soliloquy " in commemoration 
of the Crystal Palace exhibition. Its title was 
The Lily and the Bee.^ It describes a day, a 
night, and an early morning passed in the 
Crystal Palace, but its real subject, the author 
declares, is " Man — a unity." Into its rhyth- 
mic structure, which is prevalently iambic, are 
woven passages from the Bible, Milton, Shake- 
speare, and Wordsworth. It uses almost every 
stylistic device now identified with Walt Whit- 
man, — catalogue, ejaculation, apostrophe, epi- 
thet, and high astounding term. As the imagin- 
ation of the author roves from country to coun- 
try, he exclaims : — 

" In dusky, rainless Egypt now ! 

Mysterious memories come crowding round — 

^ Reprinted promptly in America by Harpers, and reviewed 
in Harper'' s Monthly in November, 1851. Later it was included 
in a new edition of Warren's essays, entitled Now and Then. It 
will be found in vol. iv of Warren's Collected Works, Edinburgh 
edition. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 93 

From misty Mizraim to Ibrahim — 

Abraham ! Joseph ! Pharaoh's Plagues ! 

Shepherd Kings ! Sesostris ! 

Cambyses ! Xerxes ! Alexander ! Ptolemies ! Antony ! 
Cleopatra ! Csesar — 

Isis ! Osiris ! Temples .! Sphinxes ! Obelisks ! Alexandria ! 

The Pyramids. 

The Nile ! 

Napoleon ! Nelson ! 

— Behold, my son, quoth the Royal Mother, this ancient 
wondrous country — destined scene of mighty do- 
ings — perchance of coniflict, deadly, tremendous, 
such as the world has never seen, nor warrior 
dreamed of. 

Even now the attracting centre of world-wide anxieties. 

On this spot see settled the eyes of sleepless Statesmen — 

Lo ! a British engineer, even while I speak, connects the 
Red Sea with the Mediterranean : Alexandria and 
Cairo made as one — 

Behold Napoleon, deeply intent on the great project ! 

See him, while the tide of the Red Sea is out, on the self- 
same sites traversed three thousand years before 
by the children of Israel ! 

He drinks at the Wells of Moses, at the foot of Mount 
Sinai : 

He returns and so the tide : The shades of night approach : 
behold the hero, just whelmed beneath the waters — 
even like the ancient Pharaoh ! — 

Had such event been willed on high ! " — 

Then, after passing by various nations, includ- 
ing 

" Prussia, proud, learned, thoughtful, martial ! " — 

a line that one would instinctively ascribe to 



94 WALT WHITMAN 

Whitman even if one found it in an Egyptian 

tomb — we return to the author, pacing through 

the aisles : — 

" A unit unperceived, 

I sink into the living stream again ! — 

Nave, transept, aisles and Galleries, 

Pacing untired : insatiate ! 

Touchstone of character ! capacity ! and knowledge ! 

Spectacle, now lost in the Spectators : then spectators in 
the spectacle ! 

Rich : poor : gentle : simple : wise : foolish : young : 
old : learned : ignorant : thoughtful : thoughtless : 
haughty : humble : frivolous : profound : 

Every grade of intellect : every shade of character I 

Now he is speaking with brother engineers — English, 
French, German, Russian — showing the Hydraulic 
Press, which raised to the height of a hundred feet 
huge tubes of iron two thousand tons in weight : 
now the French Turbine : the centrifugal pump : 
the steam-hammer — oh, mighty Steam ! 

— Here behold Power ! 

Exact : docile : delicate : tremendous in operation : 
dealing, easily, alike with filmy gossamer lace, silk, 
flax, hemp, cotton, granite, iron ! " 

After another sweep through history — 
" Glorious De Bouillon Here ! 
Famed warrior of the Cross ! Conqueror of Ascalon ! 

Captor of Jerusalem ! Hero of dazzling darkened 

Tasso's song ! " — 

we are brought back again, in true Whitman 
style, to the author, who, apparently, as Walt 
once said of himself. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 95. 

" Stands amused, complacent, compassionate, idle, unitary, 

Looking with side-curved head curious what will come 

next, 
Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering 

at it." 

And thus the author ejaculates : — 

« Poor Bee ! Dost thou see Me ? 

And note my speculations, 

Thinking so curiously, all so confident ! 

Of thee, thy Being, Doings ! 

— Myself ! the While ! 

Unconsciously contemplated by Intelligence, unseen ! 

Transcending mortal man 

Yet far himself from the Supreme 

As finite from the Infinite ! 

This moment loftily scanning Me, 

Suspending for awhile his cares sublime, 

And gazing down on Me, 

On all My Fellows clustering round 

In this our Hive, 

Of fancied splendour ! vastness ! " 

It would be hard to find a more curious liter- 
ary parallel to the structure of Leaves of Grass. 
Whitman's fidelity to his own programme — 
"make no quotations and no reference to any 
other writers " — forbids us to trace many of his 
" source-books," and it may never be known 
whether he had read The Lily and the Bee be- 
fore giving the final shape to his 1855 edition. 
He might easily have taken hints from it, — and 



96 WALT WHITMAN 

I think it probable that he did, — but a man of 
his inventive power did not need more than 
hints. 

His own essential model, after all is said, was 
the rhythmical patterns of the English Bible. 
Here was precisely that natural stylistic varia- 
tion between the " terrific," the *' gentle," and the 
"inferior" parts, so desired by William Blake. 
Here were lyric fragments, of consummate 
beauty, imbedded in narrative or argumentative 
passages. The parallelism which constituted the 
peculiar structural device of Hebrew poetry gave 
the English of the King James version a height- 
ened rhythm without destroying the flexibility 
and freedom natural to prose. In this strong, 
rolling music, this intense feeling, these concrete 
words expressing primal emotions in daring 
terms of bodily sensation,^ Whitman found the 
charter for the book he wished to write. 

As a whole, therefore, Leaves of Grass be- 
longed to no one accepted type of poetry. It 
was a hybrid, with sornething of the hybrid's 
exotic and disturbing ch^rm. Whitman spoke of 
it afterwards as "^ new and national declama- 
tory expression," and of his three adjectives 
the last is the most weighty. Leaves of Grass — 
whatever else it may have been — was superb 

^ Compare Thoreau's dictum : " The poet writes the history 
of his body." Thoreau's Journal for Sept. 29, 1851. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 97 

declamation. It was so full of poetry that to 
deny it the name of " poem " is pedantic ; yet 
"rhapsody" is a more closely descriptive word. 
To interpret as formal song what was intended 
for rhapsodical speech is to misread Walt Whit- 
man. Here was no born maker of poetry, like 
Shelley, transforming his thought and emotions 
into a new medium and scarcely conscious of the 
miracle he is achieving ; but rather a man bur- 
dened with sensations, wrestling with language, 
and forcing it into accents that are like the 
beating of his own tumultuous heart. Both 
Shelley and Whitman " communicate " passion ; 
but in one case we are listening to a pure aria 
that might conceivably issue from a violin or a 
skylark, while in the other we are listening to a 
declaimer with "Tears in his eyes, distraction 
in's aspect." Not to apprehend Leaves of Grass 
as a man speaking is to miss its purport. 

The Leaves of Grass of 1855 bore no pub- 
lishers' imprint, and it was not "published" in 
any formal way. An edition of a thousand copies 
was planned, but only about eight hundred seem 
actually to have been printed. Copies were placed 
on sale in a few bookstores in New York, 
Brooklyn and Boston ; press copies went to the im- 
portant periodicals, and complimentary ones to 
various men of letters. Then came the tragedy 
of hope deferred. There were practically no 



98 WALT WHITMAN 

sales. In his old age Whitman uf'ed to refer 
good-naturedly to the one man who actually 
bought a copy of the 1855 edition. The facts 
were really not quite so bad as that, but they 
were bad enough.^ The indifference began in 
the author's own household. " I saw the book," 
remarked Walt's brother George, — ^ " did n't 
read it at all — didn't think it worth reading 
— fingered it a little. Mother thought as I 
did — did not know what to make of it. . . . 
I remember mother comparing Hiawatha^ to 
Walt's, and the one seemed to us pretty much 
the same muddle as the other. Mother said that 
if Hiawatha was poetry, perhaps Walt's was." 
Walter Whitman the elder died, aged sixty-six, 
on July 11, the very month that marks the first 
issue of Leaves of Grass. What he thought of 
his son's production is not recorded. Ten days 
after his death, one of the presentation copies 
of Leaves of Grass received this most gratify- 
ing acknowledgment : — 

^ The copy before me was purchased from James T. Fields, 
at the Old Corner Bookstore in Boston, on Emerson's recom- 
mendation, by William F. Channing. He presented it to his 
sister-in-law, later the wife of W. D. O'Connor, of whom 
much is hereafter to be said. It is probable that Theodore 
Parker's copy, now in the Boston Public Library, was also 
purchased at the Old Corner Bookstore. Both of these copies 
bear many admiring pencil-marks. 

2 See In Re Walt Whitman, p. 35. 

^ Longfellow's poem was published in November, 1855. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 99 

Concord, Mass., July 21st, 1855. 

Dear Sir, — I am not blind to the worth of 
the wonderful gift of Leaves of Grass. I find 
it the most extraordinary piece of wit and wis- 
dom that America has yet contributed. I am 
very happy in reading it, as great power makes 
us happy. It meets the demand I am always 
making of what seems the sterile and stingy Na- 
ture, as if too much handiwork or too much 
lymph in the temperament were making our 
Western wits fat and mean. I give you joy of 
your free and brave thought. I have great joy 
in it. I find incomparable things, said incom- 
parably well, as they must be. I find the cour- 
age of treatment which so delights us, and 
which large perception only can inspire. 

I greet you at the beginning of a great ca- 
reer, which yet must have had a long foreground 
somewhere, for such a start. I rubbed my eyes 
a little to see if this sunbeam were no illusion ; 
but the solid sense of the book is a sober cer- 
tainty. It has the best merits, namely, of for- 
tifying and encouraging. 

I did not know, until I last night saw the book 
advertised in a newspaper, that I could trust the 
name as real and available for a post-office. 

I wish to see my benefactor, and have felt 
much like striking my tasks, and visiting New 
York to pay you my respects. 

R. W. Emerson. 



100 WALT WHITMAN 

Truer or more valued praise than this there 
could not be, and it is not strange that Whit- 
man was, as his brother George said, " set up." 
But Emerson's letter remained for a long time 
the only one of its tenor. Whittier, it is said, 
threw his presentation copy of Leaves of Grass 
into the fire; and other men of letters angrily 
returned their copies to the donor. The reviews 
in newspapers and other periodicals were as di- 
vergent as possible. Thanks to Whitman's un- 
wearied interest in collecting press clippings 
about himself, many of these reviews were pub- 
lished in an appendix to the 1856 edition, and 
elsewhere.^ Other notices, hitherto uncollected, 
may easily be traced in the files of periodicals 
of that day. Some were utterly condemnatory. 
The New York Criterion ^ characterized the book 
as "muck " and " obscenity ; " the London Critic 
declared that " Walt Whitman is as unac- 
quainted with art as a hog is with mathematics," 
and that one page " deserves nothing so richly 
as the public executioner's whip." The Boston 
Intelligencer comments upon its " bombast, 
egotism, vulgarity and nonsense," and the Boston 

1 Leaves of Grass Imprints was a collection of such no- 
tices issued by Whitman's publishers, Thayer and Eldridge, 
Boston, June, 1860. 

' 2 On O'Connor's copy of Leaves of Grass Imprints this 
notice is credited to R. W. Griswold. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 101 

Post upon its "exulting audacity of Priapus- \ 
worshipping obscenity." 

The Boston Christian Examiner uses the 
phrases " impious libidinousness " and " Ithyphal- 
lic audacity." The tone of such comments is 
fairly representative of most of the briefer no- 
tices which the book received. But in many 
quarters it elicited thoughtful and suggestive 
criticism. The North American Review^ at that 
time published in Boston, under the editor- 
ship of Andrew P. Peabody, printed in January, 
1856, an unsigned review by Edward Everett 
Hale. He spoke of the " freshness, simplicity and 
reality" of the book, "clad in the simplest, truest 
and often the most nervous English ; " of " the 
wonderful sharpness and distinctness of his ima- 
gination ; " and affirmed that " there is not a 
word in it meant to attract readers by its gross- 
ness." It is interesting to note that Dr. Hale 
reaffirmed this judgment more than thirty years 
afterward.^ 

The New York Crayon^ founded not long be- 
fore by the talented journalist and artist W. J. 
Stillman, printed under the title " The Assem- 
bly of Extremes " a joint review of Tennyson's 
Maud and Whitman's Leaves of Grass. The 
critic finds both poets too nonchalant of forms ; 

1 See W. S. Kennedy's Reminiscences of Walt Whitmanj 
London and Paisley, 1896. 



102 WALT WHITMAN 

and then passes to this clear statement of one 
result of Whitman's optimism : " To Walt Whit- 
man, all things are alike good — nothing is bet- 
ter than another, and thence there is no ideal, 
no aspiration, no progress to things better. It is 
not enough that all things are good, all things 
are equally good, and, therefore, there is no 
order in creation ; no better, no worse, — but all 
is a democratic level, from which can come no 
symmetry, in which there is no head, no subordi- 
nation, no system, and, of course, no result. With 
a wonderful vigor of thought and intensity of 
perception, a power, indeed, not often found, 
Leaves of Grass has no ideality, no concentra- 
tion, no purpose — it is barbarous, undisciplined, 
like the poetry of a half -civilized people, and, as 
a whole, useless, save to those miners of thought 
who prefer the metal in its un worked state." 
Whether one agrees with it or not, this i§ surely 
criticism of a stimulating sort. 

Putnam's Monthly for September, 1855, 
speaks of " a curious and lawless collection of 
poems . . . neither in rhyme or blank verse, 
but in a sort of excited prose, broken into lines 
without any attempt at measure or regularity." 
The poems themselves, the critic continues, with 
a shrewd perception of Whitman's indebtedness 
to his forerunners, " may briefly be described 
as a compound of the New England transcen- 



LEAVES OF GR^.S>S 103 

dentalist and New York rowdy. A fireman or 
omnibus driver, who had intelligence enough to 
absorb the speculations of that school of thought 
which culminated at Boston some^teen or eight- 
een years ago, and resources of expression to put 
them forth again in a form of his own, with 
sufficient self-conceit and cr»ntempt for public 
taste to affront all usual propriety of diction, 
might have written this g^oss yet elevated, this 
superficial yet profound, this preposterous yet 
somehow fascinating Book." 

The Transcendental strain in Whitman, as 
well as his curious passion for cataloguing, was 
wittily touched upon by the London Examiner : 
" We must be content to describe this Brooklyn 
boy as a wild Tupper of the West. . . . Suppose 
that Mr. Tupper had been brought up to the 
business of an auctioneer, then banished to the 
backwoods, compelled to live for a long time as 
a backwoodsman, and thus contracting a passion 
for the reading of Emerson and Carlyle; sup- 
pose him maddened by this course of reading, 
and fancying himself not only an Emerson but 
a Carlyle and an American Shakespeare to boot, 
when the fits come on, and putting forth his 
notion of that combination in his own self-satis- 
fied way, and in his own wonderful cadences? 
In that state he would write a book exactly 
like Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass.^^ 



104 V AJ.i WHITMAN 

The London Lender, on the other hand, 
thought the book by no means mere food for 
laughter, and endeavored to point out its " stag- 
gering " central principle. 

* " It seems to resolvp Iiself into an all-attracting 
egotism — an e+ presence of the individ- 

ual soul of Y ait Whitman in all things, yet in 
such wise that this one soul shall be presented 
as a type of all hur^n souls whatsoever. He 
goes forth into th^ woal, this rough, devil-may- 
care Yankee; pa o^onatoly identifies himself 
with all forms of bem.'r, sentient or inanimate ; 
sympathizes deeply with humanity ; riots with 
a kind of Bacchanal fury in the force and fer- 
vor of his own sensations; will not have the 
most vicious or abandoned shut out *^rom final 
comfort and reconciliation • ^^ delighted with 
Broadway, New York, and 4ually in love with 
the desolate backwoods, and the long stretch of 
the uninhabited prairie, where the wild beasts 
wallow in the reeds, and the wilder birds start 
upward from their nests among the grass ; per- 
ceives a divine mystery wherever his feet con- 
duct, or his thoughts transport him ; and beholds 
all things tending toward the central and sov- 
ereign Me. Such, as we conceive, is the key to 
this strange, grotesque and bewildering book ; 
yet we are far from saying that the key will un- 
lock all the quirks and oddities of the volume. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 105 

Much remains of which we confess we can make 
nothing; much that seems to us purely fa^itas- 
tical and preposterous ; much that appears to 
our muddy vision gratuitously prosaic, need- 
lessly plain-speaking, disgusting without pur- 
pose, and singular without result. There are so 
many evidences of a noble soul in Whitman's 
pages that we regret these aberrations, which 
only have the effect of discrediting what is 
genuine by the show of something false; and 
especially do we deplore the unnecessary open- 
ness with which Walt reveals to us matters 
which ought rather to remain in sacred silence. 
It is good not to be ashamed of Nature ; it is 
good to have an all-inclusive charity ; but it is 
also good, sometimes, to leave the veil across 
the Temple." 

None of the contemporary notices of Leaves 
of Grass, however, are more interesting than 
those which were composed by its author. There 
is an amiable story of David Garrick's widow, 
who is said to have remarked to a young play- 
wright who was bewailing his hard treatment by 
the critics: "Why don't you write the notices 
yourself ? Davy always did." Whitman, at any 
rate, throughout his career as a poet, had no 
scruples about composing laudatory anonymous 
notices of himself, and sending them to the news- 
papers. The fact that Spenser, Leigh Hunt, and 



106 WALT WHITMAN 

other poets had published self-criticisms had 
earl^ attracted his attention, and he doubtless 
saw no reason why he should not follow their 
example. It has sometimes been urged that his 
anonymous, defense of Leaves of Grass was 
called forth by the abusive attacks upon it, but 
the fact that at least three of his elaborate 
articles appeared almost immediately after the 
publication of the book shows that they were 
part of a deliberate campaign. Believing abso- 
lutely in himself and his book, he took a large and 
unconventional view of the publicity involved ; 
and, indelicate though his procedure unquestion- 
ably was, it differs very little from that of count- 
less reputable authors of our own day who do not 
hesitate to send "literary notes" about them- 
selves to their publishers to be used in exploiting 
their books. 

One, at least, of these pieces of self -exposition 
should be quoted at some length. It appeared in 
the Brooklyn Times of September 29, 1855, and 
its style is so characteristic that it is curious 
that it should not have been attributed to Whit- 
man at once. 

" To give judgment on real poems, one needs 
an account of the poet himself. Very devilish 
to some, and very divine to some, will appear 
the poet of these new poems, the 'Leaves of 
Grass ; ' an attempt, as they are, of a naive, 



LEAVES OF GRASS 107 

masculine, affectionate, contemplative, sensual, 
imperious person, to cast into literature not 
only his own grit and arrogance, but his own 
flesh and form, undraped, regardless of models, 
regardless of modesty or law, and ignorant or 
silently scornful, as at first appears, of all except 
his own presence and experience, and all outside 
the fiercely loved land of his birth, and the birth 
of his parents, and their parents for several gen- 
erations before him. Politeness this man has 
none, and regulation he has none. A rude child 
of the people ! — No imitation — No foreigner — 
but a growth and idiom of America. No discon- 
tented — a careless slouch, enjoying to-day. No 
dilettante democrat — a man who is art-and-part 
with the commonalty, and with immediate life — 
loves the streets — loves the docks — loves the 
free rasping talk of men — likes to be called by 
his given name, and nobody at all need Mr. him 
— can laugh with laughers — likes the ungenteel 
ways of laborers — is not prejudiced one mite 
against the Irish — talks readily with them — 
talks readily with niggers — does not make a 
stand on being a gentleman, nor on learning or 
manners — eats cheap fare, likes the strong 
flavored coffee of the coffee-stands in the mar- 
ket, at sunrise — likes a supper of oysters fresh 
from the oyster-smack — likes to make one at 
the crowded table among sailors and work- 



108 WALT WHITMAN 

people — would leave a select soiree of elegant 
people any time to go with tumultuous men, 
roughs, receive their caresses and welcome, 
listen to their noise, oaths, smut, fluency, laugh- 
ter, repartee — and can preserve his presence 
perfectly among these, and the like of these. 
The effects he produces in his poems are no 
effects of artists or the arts, but effects of the 
original eye or arm, or the actual atmosphere, 
or tree, or bird. You may feel the unconscious 
teaching of a fine^brute, but will never feel the 
artificial teaching of a fine writer or speaker. 

" Other poets celebrate great events, person- 
ages, romances, wars, loves, passions, the victo- 
ries and power of their country, or some real or 
imagined incident — and polish their work and 
come to conclusions, and satisfy the reader. 
This poet celebrates natural propensities in him- 
self ; and that is the way he celebrates all. He 
comes to no conclusions, and does not satisfy the 
reader. He certainly leaves him what the serpent 
left the woman and the man, the taste of the 
Paradisaic tree of the knowledge of good and 
evil, never to be erased again. 

"What good is it to argue about egotism? 
There can be no two thoughts on Walt Whit- 
man's egotism. That is avowedly what he steps 
out of the crowd and turns and faces them for. 
Mark, critics ! Otherwise is not used for you the 



LEAVES OF GRASS 109 

key that leads to the use of the other keys to this 
well-enveloped man. His whole work, his life, 
manners, friendships, writings, all have among 
their leading purposes an evident purpose to 
stamp a new type of character, namely his own, 
and indelibly fix it and publish it, not for a 
model but an illustration, for the present and 
future of American letters and American young 
men, for the south the same as the north, and 
for the Pacific and Mississippi country, and 
Wisconsin and Texas and Kansas and Canada 
and Havana and Nicaragua, just as much as New 
York and Boston. Whatever is needed toward 
this achievement, he puts his hand to, and lets 
imputations take their time to die. 

"First be yourself what you would show in 
your poem — such seems to be this man's exam- 
ple and inferred rebuke to the schools of poets. 
He makes no allusions to books or writers ; their 
spirits do not seem to have touched him; he 
has not a word to say for or against them, or 
their theories or ways. He never oiBfers others ; 
what he continually offers is the man whom our 
Brooklyn ites know so well. Of pure American 
breed, large and lusty — age thirty-six years, 
(1855) — never once using medicine — never 
dressed in black, always dressed freely and clean 
in strong clothes — neck open, shirt-collar flat 
and broad, countenance tawny transparent red, 



110 WALT WHITMAN 

beard well-mottled with white, hair like hay after 
it has been mowed in the field and lies tossed 
and streaked — his physiology corroborating a 
rugged phrenology — a person singularly beloved 
and looked toward, especially by young men and 
the illiterate — one who has firm attachments 
there, and associates there — one who does not as- 
sociate with literary people — a man never called 
upon to make speeches at public dinners — never 
on platforms amid the crowds of clergymen, or 
professors, or aldermen, or congressmen — rather 
down in the bay with pilots in their pilot-boat — 
or off on a cruise with fishers in a fishing-smack 
— or riding on a Broadway omnibus, side by 
side with the driver — or with a band of loungers 
over the open grounds of the country — fond of 
New York and Brooklyn — fond of the life of 
the great ferries — one whom, if you should 
meet, you need not expect to meet an extraordi- 
nary person — one in whom you will see the 
singularity which consists in no singularity — 
whose contact is no dazzle or fascination, nor re- 
quires any deference, but has the easy fascina- 
tion of what is homely and accustomed — as of 
something you knew before, and was waiting 
for — there you have Walt Whitman, the be- 
getter of a new offspring out of literature, taking 
with easy nonchalance the chances of its present 
reception, and, through all misunderstandings 



LEAVES OF GRASS 111 

and distrusts, the chances of its future reception 
— preferring always to speak for himself rather 
than have others speak for him." Precisely ! 

A second article by Whitman, appearing in 
the American Phrenological Journal^ published 
by Fowler and Wells of New York, who were 
shortly to become the publishers of the second 
edition of Leaves of Grass, is entitled "An 
English and an American Poet," and is devoted 
to a comparison of Whitman's Leaves with 
Tennyson's Maud. Admitting that Tennyson 
"is a ifeal poet, in spite of his ennui and his 
aristocracy," the anonymous reviewer neverthe- 
less considers Walt Whitman the "haughtiest 
of writers that has ever yet written and printed 
a book. His is to prove either the most lament- 
able of failures or the most glorious of triumphs 
in the known history of literature. And after 
all we have written we confess our brain-felt 
and heart-felt inability to decide which we think 
it is likely to be." 

A certain caution, not unbecoming to a literary 
prophet, may be traced in that last sentence. 
But in the third of Whitman's anonymous self- 
reviews, there is no hedging. It appeared in the 
magazine that had welcomed him a dozen years 
before, — the United States and Democratic He- 
view, for September, 1855. The stout old Review 
was sailing into troubled political waters in those 



112 WALT WHITMAN 

days, and changing pilots rather often, but it 
carried the burden of Whitman's fortunes gal- 
lantly enough. "An American bard at last!" 
triumphantly begins the article, which is too long 
to be printed here.^ " One of the roughs, large, 
proud, affectionate, eating, drinking and breeding, 
his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt 
and bearded, his postures strong and erect, his 
voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous 
races of young and old. We shall cease sham- 
ming and be what we really are. We shall start 
an athletic and defiant literature. We realize 
now how it is, and what was most lacking. The 
interior American republic shall also be declared 
free and independent." 

So it marches, page after page, until the re- 
viewer, closing with a crescendo passage, gravely 
salutes the poet : " You have come in good time, 
Walt Whitman! In opinions, in manners, in 
costumes, in books, in the aims and occupancy 
of life, in associates, in poems, conformity to all 
unnatural and tainted customs passes without 
remark, while perfect naturalness, health, faith, 
self-reliance, and all primal expressions of the 
manliest love and friendship, subject one to the 
stare and controversy of the world." 

The practical difficulty was that in spite of all 

^ The three reviews just quoted were printed in Leaves of 
Grass Imprints, and later in In Be Walt Whitman. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 113 

this excellent advertising and " the stare and con- 
troversy of the world," the edition of 1855 could 
not be sold. In vain did Whitman print several 
pages of press-notices, including the three written 
by himself, and bind them into the unsold re- 
mainder of the edition. People did not want it. 
Then, with the stubborn Dutch patience which 
underlay the poseur^ he determined upon the 
course which he was to follow to the end. " When 
the book aroused such a tempest of anger and 
condemnation everywhere,'* he said afterward, 
" I went off to the east end of Long Island and 
Peconic Bay. Then came back to New York 
with the confirmed resolution, from which I 
never afterward wavered, to go on with my poetic 
enterprise in my own way and finish it as well as 
I could." He gave up the carpenter's trade for- 
ever, and continuing to live under his mother's 
roof, set himself to the composition of new poems. 
By June, 1856, he was ready with his second 
edition, a fat sixteenmo of 384 pages, contain- 
ing thirty-two poems in all, including eleven out 
of the twelve originally published. All of the 
poems were numbered and furnished with titles. 
Among the new pieces were the significant ones 
now known under the titles " Salut au Monde," 
" Song of the Broad- Axe," " By Blue Ontario's 
Shore," "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry," "Song of 
the Open Koad." Two or three of the briefer 



114 WALT WHITMAN 

poems were daring — even for Whitman — both 
in title and treatment. In the pieces retained 
from the first edition the alterations were slight. 
The preface disappeared, though certain passages 
from it now emerged as verse. The portrait was 
retained. No publisher's name appeared, Messrs. 
Fowler and Wells of New York, who brought 
out the edition, preferring to withhold their im- 
print. The most striking external feature of the 
volume was an extract from Emerson's letter of 
the year before, now printed in gilt letters upon 
the back of the new and enlarged edition : — 

I GEEET YOU AT 

THE BEGINNING OF A GREAT CAREER. 

R. W. EMERSON.^ 

Few acts of Whitman's life were more resented 
by fellow-writers than this unauthorized use of 
a personal letter. Yet Charles A. Dana, a friend 
of both men, had counseled Whitman to utilize 
Emerson's praise, and it is unlikely tiiat Whit- 
man, who was quite without natural delicacy in 
such matters, saw any good reason for hiding 
under a bushel the glorious candle which Emer- 
son had lighted. But the Concord philosopher 
was, for the moment, pardonably annoyed. A 
friend ^ who happened to be Emerson's guest on 

1 See the reproduction opposite. 

2 Mr. Josiah P. Quincy of Boston. 




COVER OF 185G EDITION 



LEAVES OF GRASS . 115 

the day the book arrived in .Concord has kindly 
written out for me his recollection of the inci- 
dent : — 

"Mr. Emerson came into his study at Con- 
cord where I was sitting, bearing in his hand a 
book which he had just received. This was the 
new edition of Whitman's book with the words 
' I greet you at the beginning of a great career. 
K. W. Emerson,' printed in gold letters upon 
the cover. Emerson looked troubled, and ex- 
pressed annoyance that a sentence from a private 
letter should be wrenched from its context and so 
emblazoned. He afterwards gave me the book, 
saying that the inside was worthy attention even 
though it came from one capable of so misusing 
the cover. I noted the incident because at no 
other time had I seen a cloud of dissatisfaction 
darken that serene countenance." 

A less conspicuous but far more regrettable 
feature of this edition was the appendix entitled 
"Leaves-Droppings." It consisted chiefly of 
press-notices, but prefaced these with Emer- 
son's letter of July, 1855, and with an extraordi- 
nary and most disingenuous answer, which 
begins thus : — 

Brooklyn, August, 1856. 

Here are thirty-two Poems, which I send you, 
dear Friend and Master, not having found how 
I could satisfy myself with sending any usual 



116 WALT WHITMAN 

acknowledgment of your letter. Tlie first edi- 
tion, on which you mailed me that till now 
unanswered letter, was twelve poems — I printed 
a thousand copies, and they readily sold ; these 
thirty-two Poems I stereotype, to print several 
thousand copies of. I much enjoy making poems. 
Other work I have set for myself to do, to meet 
people and The States face to face, to confront 
them with an American rude tongue ; but the 
work of my life is making poems. I keep on till 
1 make a hundred, and then several hundred — 
perhaps a thousand. The way is clear to me. 
A few years, and the average annual call for my 
Poems is ten or twenty thousand copies — more, 
quite likely. Why should I hurry or compromise ? 
In poems or in speeches I say the word or two 
that has got to be said, adhere to the body, step 
with the countless common footsteps, and remind 
every man or woman of something. 

" Master, I am a man who has perfect faith. 
Master, we have not come through centuries, caste, 
heroisms, fables, to halt in this land today." 

To say nothing of its romancing about the 
sale of the first edition, the tone of this opening 
is so mawkish as to leave an unpleasant impres- 
sion as to Whitman's nervous condition at the 
time. He was over-excited, no doubt, and felt 
that he was playing for high stakes. The letter 



LEAVES OF GRASS 117 

is mainly devoted to a plea for a masculine and 
native American literature, and Emerson must 
have recognized in it a curious echo and pro- 
duct of his own " American Scholar " address 
of nineteen years before, — that address which 
Holmes fitly characterized as " our intellectual 
Declaration of Independence." Whitman's own 
sense of his indebtedness is clearly confessed at 
the close, where, after speaking of the "new 
moral American continent " without which the 
physical continent remained incomplete, he de- 
clares : — 

Those shores you found. I say you have led 
The States there — have led Me there. I say 
that none has ever done or ever can do, a greater 
deed for The States, than your deed. Others 
may line out the lines, build cities, work mines, 
break up farms ; it is yours to have been the 
original true Captain who put to sea, intuitive, 
positive, rendering the first report, to be told less 
by any report, and more by the mariners of a 
thousand bays, in each tack of their arriving 
and departing, many years after you. 

Receive, dear Master, these statements and 
assurances through me, for all the young men, 
and for an earnest that we know none before you, 
but the best following you ; and that we demand 
to take your name into our keeping, and that we 



118 WALT WHITMAN 

understand what you have indicated, and find 
the same indicated in ourselves, and that we will 
stick to it and enlarge upon it through These 
States. 

Walt Whitman. 

But if the cover and the appendix of the 1856 
edition of Leaves of Grass revealed the social 
and moral obtuseness of a man walking in the 
primrose path of self -exploitation, the volume 
nevertheless showed indubitable literary power. 
In vividness of phrase, in haunting cadence, in 
largeness of imagination, and in what Henry 
Sidgwick was later to term " cosmic emotion," 
there had been no American book comparable 
with it. Its anomalous form and its " unwise 
excursions into tacenda " soon proved, however, 
to be obstacles which contemporary criticism 
could not surmount. The newspaper notices of 
the second edition were, if anything, more con- 
demnatory than those of the previous year, partly, 
no doubt, because the book contained a few 
pieces whose frank animality was more apparent 
than any poetical quality. Fowler and Wells, 
alarmed at the outcry, refused to sell the volume 
which they had manufactured. 

In face of the disappointment Whitman stol- 
idly held his ground. He began to be visited 
by men of intellectual distinction, curious to see 



LEAVES OF GRASS 119 

what he was like. Moncure D. Conway, a young 
Virginian who had gone to Concord in order to 
be near Emerson, was advised by the latter to 
call upon Whitman in Brooklyn. He had found 
him, September 17, 1855, revising proof at 
Rome's printing-office, and " came off delighted 
with him." Whitman told Conway that he was 
the first who had visited him because of his 
book.^ Emerson himself came not long after- 
ward, as did A. Bronson Alcott, the vague and 
impractical high priest of Transcendentalism, 
who found much in Whitman to approve. Wil- 
liam Cullen Bryant, the austere and pure, already 
over sixty and carrying the burden of his editor- 
ship of the Evening Post, crossed Brooklyn 
Ferry to have long talks and walks with the 
author of Leaves of Grass.^ Another visitor was 
Henry D. Thoreau, who had made his first call 
in company with Alcott. Thoreau' s first impres- 
sion, as communicated to Harrison Blake,^ was 
this : " He is apparently the greatest democrat 
the world has seen. ... A remarkably strong 
though coarse nature, of a sweet disposition, and 



1 See M. D. Conway's Autobiography, Memories, and Reminis- 
cences, Boston, 1904. 

2 Later, however, like many other original enthusiasts, 
Bryant "shook his head." See Justin McCarthy's Bevmiis- 
cences, vol. i, page 196. 

^ Thoreau's Familiar Letters, page 340. 



120 WALT WHITMAN 

much prized by his friends . . . He is very broad ; 
but, as I have said, not fine. He said that I mis- 
apprehended him. I am not quite sure that I do." 
A later letter to Blake is well-known : ^ — 

[to HARRISON BLAKE.] 

December 7 [1856]. 

That Walt Whitman, of whom I wrote to 
you, is the most interesting fact to me at present. 
I have just read his second edition (which he 
gave me), and it has done me more good than 
any reading for a long time. Perhaps I remem- 
ber best the poem of Walt Whitman, an Ameri- 
can, and the Sun-Down Poem. There are two or 
three pieces in the book which are disagreeable, 
to say the least; simply sensual. He does not 
celebrate love at all. It is as if the beasts spoke. 
I think that men have not been ashamed of 
themselves without reason. No doubt there have 
always been dens where such deeds were un- 
blushingly recited, and it is no merit to compete 
with their inhabitants. But even on this side 
he has spoken more truth than any American or 
modern that I know. I have found his poem 
exhilarating, encouraging. As for its sensuality, 
— and it may turn out to be less sensual than 
it appears, — I do not so much wish that those 
parts were not written, as that men and women 
1 Thoreau's Familiar Letters, page 345. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 121 

were so pure that they could read them with- 
out harm, that is, without understanding them. 
One woman told me that no woman could read 
it, — as if a man could read what a woman 
could not. Of course Walt Whitman can com- 
municate to us no experience, and if we are 
shocked, whose experience is it that we are re- 
minded of ? 

On the whole, it sounds to me very brave and 
American, after whatever deductions. I do not 
believe that all the sermons, so called, that have 
been preached in this land put together are equal 
to it for preaching. 

We ought to rejoice greatly in him. He occa- 
sionally suggests something a little more than 
human. You can't confound him with the other 
inhabitants of Brooklyn or New York. How 
they must shudder when they read him! He 
is awfully good. 

To be sure I sometimes feel a little imposed 
on. By his heartiness and broad generalities he 
puts me into a liberal frame of mind prepared to 
see wonders, — as it were, sets me upon a hill or 
in the midst of a plain, — stirs me well up, and 
then — throws in a thousand of brick. Though 
rude, and sometimes ineffectual, it is a great prim- 
itive poem, — an alarum or trumpet-note ring- 
ing through the American camp. Wonderfully 
like the Orientals, too, considering that when I 



122 WALT WHITMAN 

asked him if he had read them, he answered, 
" No : tell me about them." 

I did not get far in conversation with him, — 
two more being present, — and among the few 
things which I chanced to say, I remember that 
one was, in answer to him as representing Amer- 
ica, that I did not think much of America or of 
politics, and so on, which may have been some- 
what of a damper to him. 

Since I have seen him, I find that I am not 
disturbed by any brag or egoism in his book. He 
may turn out the least of a braggart of all, hav- 
ing a better right to be confident. 

He is a great fellow. 

Emerson had written in that same year to 
Carlyle : — 

"One book, last summer, came out in New 
York, a nondescript monster, which yet had ter- 
rible eyes and buffalo strength, and was indis- 
putably American — which I thought to send 
you ; but the book throve so badly with the few 
to whom I showed it and wanted good morals so 
much, that I never did. Yet I believe now again, 
I shall. It is called Leaves of Grass — was writ- 
ten and printed by a journeyman printer in 
Brooklyn, New York, named Walter Whitman ; 
and after you have looked into it, if you think, 
as you may, that it is only an auctioneer's inven- 



LEAVES OF GRASS 123 

tory of a warehouse, you can light your pipe 
with it." 1 

One fact seems to have impressed all these 
visitors. Instead of the " terrible eyes and buf- 
falo strength " which might have been expected, 
they found a quiet, slow man, pleasant- voiced, re- 
ticent, studiously chaste in speech and modest of 
manner ; a man, in short, as little like the " New 
York rowdy " of Leaves of Grass as could be 
imagined. Whitman welcomed his callers simply 
and heartily, listened to their conversation, and 
made no attempt to play the oracle himself. He 
seemed to possess unhindered leisure. His phys- 
ical wants were of the simplest. He rose late, 
wrote or read as fancy led him, and often in the 
afternoon or evening crossed the ferry to New 
York, where he would ride hour after hour in his 
favorite seat on top of an omnibus, or linger in 
some Bohemian resort like Pf aff 's, on Broadway, 
among a group of young newspaper men. He 
began now to have the satisfaction of being 
pointed out as the man who had written Leaves 
of Grass. He met new acquaintances genially, 
and borrowed money from them if he happened 
to need it, with the forgetful freedom of old 
comradeship. He persuaded one man of letters, 
then recently married, to intrust to him the 
whole of a slender fortune, which was straight- 

^ Emerson-Carlyle Corresjmndence^ 1883, vol. ii, p. 25. 



124 WALT WHITMAN 

way lost in speculation. His friend brought suit 
to recover, but it was like trying to coin a 
vacuum. In such transactions poets are rarely 
at their best. 

At times Whitman elaborated various schemes 
for supporting himself by becoming an itinerant 
lecturer. The price of admission, as he first 
figured it, was to be fifteen cents. Afterward 
he lowered it to ten, but the scheme came to 
nothing. An American Primer^ a shrewd 
though unlearned inquiry into the aesthetic value 
of words, was to have been one of these lectures. 
He made many notes upon vocal culture and 
gesticulation, and upon the different styles re- 
quisite for popular success in different sections 
of the country. Fascinating as the function of 
the orator always was to him, it is scarcely con- 
ceivable that he would have been practically 
suited for such a role. His friends O'Connor and 
John Swinton used later to laugh at his attempts 
at declamation, because of his habit of constrict- 
ing his throat and his artificial manner of recita- 
tion. His platform appearances, toward the end 
of his life, gave no evidence that he possessed 
the orator's gifts ; his voice was then high and 
thin, and aside from his striking countenance, 
his audiences found him unimpressive. 

To the born orator, the temper of the late fif- 
1 First published in The Atlantic Monthly for April, 1904. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 125 

ties would have been more hospitable than to the 
poet. A commercial panic startled the well-to-do 
from their security. Politics were a troubled 
stream, and the nation was drifting toward civil 
war. Upon some of the fundamental issues in- 
volved in that conflict Whitman had felt deeply 
and spoken freely in the past. He had deserted 
the Democratic party, had become a Free-Soiler 
and Abolitionist. Yet for half a dozen years 
after the spiritual excitement that resulted in 
Leaves of Grass, his mind dwelt almost wholly 
upon personal emotions and upon the larger re- 
lations of man with the universe. Politics went 
to the background of his attention until well 
after the opening of the War of the Kebellion. 
From 1857 to 1860 he continued to devote 
himself to perfecting his book, writing more 
than a hundred new poems, and altering the text 
and the order of those already issued. He com- 
posed, both now and later, with extreme care, 
and with an old typesetter's obstinacy regarding 
his own system of punctuation and capitalization. 
Frequently he prepared in advance long lists 
of synonyms and epithets likely to be useful 
in writing a specific poem, and his manuscripts 
show his unwearied endeavor to try one variant 
after another until his ear was satisfied. The 
two most important of the new groups of pieces 
were entitled "Enfans d'Adam" (later, "Child- 



126 WALT WHITMAN 

ren of Adam") and "Calamus." In the first of 
these groups he brought together, once for all, 
what he had to say upon the sex relations of 
men and women, — never afterward recurring to 
this vexed theme ; in the second group, which 
remains one of the most difficult and mystical sec- 
tions of his book, he expounds his theory of the 
friendship of men for men. He wrote, too, a pro- 
logue and epilogue for the whole volume, with a 
sort of architectonic endeavor like that cherished 
by Wordsworth in his scheme of the relation of 
" The Prelude " and " The Excursion " to " The 
Kecluse." 

By 1860 Whitman was again ready to seek a 
publisher, and he found a hospitable house in 
Boston, — that of Messrs. Thayer and Eldridge. 
They put their name upon the title-page, over 
the date 1860-61. The portrait used in the earlier 
edition was discarded in favor of a new engraving 
of the author, after a painting made by Charles 
Hine in 1859 ; and though the face is not wholly 
pleasing, there is less of that peculiar sensuality 
which makes the earlier portraits of Whitman 
repellent to many persons. The volume was a 
handsome one of 456 pages. Unfortunately, after 
four or five thousand copies had been sold, the 
plates passed into the hands of a New York pub- 
lisher named Worthington, who printed many 
editions from them without paying copyright. 



LEAVES OF GRASS 127 

While the book was passing through the press 
Whitman stayed in Boston, where he made some 
warm friends. He arrived about the middle of 
March, 1860. In April The Atlantic Monthly, 
then under Lowell's editorship, printed his poem, 
" Bardic Symbols," afterward named " As I 
Ebbed with the Ocean of Life." It was un- 
signed, like all the contributions to the Atlantic 
in those days, but Whitman's authorship of it 
was easily recognizable. His publisher, C. W. 
Eldridge, a man of literary taste, became a life- 
long admirer and correspondent. Eldridge's 
friend, W. D. O'Connor, then engaged in 
writing the novel Harrington for Thayer and 
Eldridge, met Whitman in the publisher's 
office, and laid the foundation of an intimacy 
which was to be renewed shortly at Washington, 
and which resulted later in his brilliant and 
famous pamphlet in Whitman's defence, entitled 
The Good Gray Poet. Another new friend 
was J. T. Trowbridge, the story-writer and poet, 
who has written a charming account of his first 
interview with Whitman.^ He found a large, 
gray-haired and gray-bearded man reading proof 
sheets at a desk in a dingy office. Whitman's talk 
was disappointing at first, but on the next Sun- 

1 Published in The Atlantic Monthly for February, 1902, and 
afterward repeated in My Own Story, Houghton, Mifflin and 
Company, 1903. 



128 WALT WHITMAN 

day, at Trowbridge's house, he conversed freely, 
particularly upon his indebtedness to Emerson, 
who had helped him to "find himself." "I was 
simmering, simmering, simmering," he declared 
in a homely metaphor ; " Emerson brought me to 
a boil." Emerson himself, who had already vis- 
ited Whitman in Brooklyn, came repeatedly to 
see him. One well-known conversation between 
them has been preserved in a reminiscence of 
Boston Common written by Whitman in Octo- 
ber, 1881: 

" Up and down this breadth by Beacon Street, 
between these same old elms, I walk'd for two 
hours, of a bright sharp February mid-day twenty- 
one years ago, with Emerson, then in his prime, 
keen, physically and morally magnetic, arm'd at 
every point, and when he chose, wielding the 
emotional just as well as the intellectual. During 
those two hours he was the talker and I the 
listener. It was an argument-statement, recon- 
noitring, review, attack, and pressing home, 
(like an army corps in order, artillery, cavalry, 
infantry,) of all that could be said against that 
part (and a main part) in the construction of 
my poems, ' Children of Adam.' More precious 
than gold to me that dissertion — it afforded me, 
ever after, this strange and paradoxical lesson ; 
each point of E.'s statement was unanswerable, 
no judge's charge ever more complete or convin- 



LEAVES OF GRASS 129 

cing, I could never hear the points better put — 
and then I felt down in my soul the clear and 
unmistakable conviction to disobey all, and pur-'' 
sue my own way. * What have you to say then 
to such things ? ' said E., pausing in conclusion. 
* Only that while I can't answer them at all, I 
feel more settled than ever to adhere to my 
own theory, and exemplify it,' was my candid 
response. Whereupon we went and had a good 
dinner at the American House. And thencefor- 
ward I never waver'd or was touch'd with qualms, 
(as I confess I had been two or three times be- 
fore.) "^ 

Another Boston celebrity whom Emerson and 
Whitman have united to honor, and whom 
Whitman first heard at this time, was Father 
Taylor, the sailor preacher. Whitman went sev- 
eral times to hear him preach, was affected to 
tears by the old man's prayers, and thought him 
the " one essentially perfect orator " among all 
the eloquent men of that day. So passed the 
pleasant weeks of leisurely proof-reading and 
congenial companionship, until Whitman re- 
turned in June to New York. 

In August Mr. Howells met him one evening 
at Pfaff's among the Saturday Press coterie, 
and has recorded ^ how Whitman " leaned back 

1 Specimen Days, p. 183. 

2 Literary Friends and Acquaintance^ p. 74. 



130 WALT WHITMAN 

in his chair and reached out his great hand to me 
as if he were going to give it to me for good and 
all. He had a fine head, with a cloud of Jovian 
hair upon it, and a branching beard and mus- 
tache, gentle eyes that looked most kindly into 
mine, and seemed to wish the liking which I in- 
stantly gave him, though we hardly passed a 
word, and our acquaintance was summed up in 
that glance and the grasp of his mighty fist 
upon my hand." 

For the following year glimpses of Whitman 
are infrequent. In the spring of 1861 the war 
came; Messrs. Thayer and Eldridge could not 
collect their bills, and Leaves of Grass became 
for the third time a book without a publisher. 
For more than five years its author had been 
putting forth the best powers tl^at lay in him, 
and the net result was that outside of a small 
group of ill-matched admirers, he was known to 
a few hundred people as a man who was said to 
have written a bizarre and indecent book. Yet 
he accepted with a tranquil patience, like that 
of the stage-drivers whom he loved, " good day's 
work and bad day's work " alike, and seemed, 
outwardly at least, to concern himself no longer 
with his literary reputation. 

If he may be said to have had any regular 
occupation during 1860 and 1861 it was that of 
acting as a volunteer nurse to the sick and dis- 



LEAVES OF GRASS 131 

abled stage-drivers. Dr. D. B. St John Koosa, in 
1860 a house surgepn of the old New York Hos- 
pital on Broadway, facing Pearl Street, wrote 
in 1896 an interesting account ^ of Whitman's 
services. The poet, scrupulously dressed in blue- 
flannel coat and vest, with gray, baggy trousers, 
and woolen shirt open at the throat, was freely 
admitted to the hospital. He was deeply moved 
by the sufferings of • his disabled friends, and 
they, as well as the young doctors belonging to 
the house staff, found his presence restful and 
helpful. He talked much of books and poetry, 
but not about himself. When the doctors were 
off duty, he often went with them to Pfaff's, for 
a glass of beer. Smoking was then, as always, 
distasteful to him, but he would sit for hours 
with these young surgeons, listening to their talk, 
and then saunter back to the hospital and re- 
turn tardily to his mother's house in Brooklyn. 
He was greatly changed, inwardly and outwardly, 
from the dapper young editor, with tall hat, 
light cane, and boutonniere, who had so light- 
heartedly promenaded Broadway, twenty years 
before. 

1 For the New York Mail and Express. It was copied in 
the Philadelphia Telegraph for June 30, 1896, and elsewhere. 



CHAPTEK IV 

WAK-TIME 

1 " Those who joined the ranks and fought the battles of 
the Republic did well ; but when the world knows, as it is 
beginning to know, how this man, without any encouragement 
from without, under no compulsion, simply, without beat of 
drum or any cheers of approval, went down into those im- 
mense lazar houses and devoted his days and nights, his heart 
and soul, and at last his health and life, to America's sick and 
wounded sons, it will say that he did even better." 

R. M. Bucks. 

With the bombardment of Fort Sumter, on 
April 12, 1861, began the Civil War. The 
news reached New York late at night. Whitman, 
who had been attending the opera in Fourteenth 
Street, was walking down Broadway about twelve 
o'clock, on his way back to Brooklyn, when he 
heard the cries of the newsboys with their ex- 
tras. Securing a copy, he stepped into the bril- 
liantly lighted Metropolitan Hotel to read it. A 
crowd gathered, listened in silence as some one 
read aloud the ominous dispatch, and as silently 
dispersed. The time for argument was over. 

For the next eighteen months there is practi- 
cally no record of Walt Whitman. His brother 



WAR-TIME 133 

George, who was ten years younger, enlisted 
promptly in the 51st New York Volunteers, ^ 

largely a Brooklyn regiment. When the 'disas- 
trous battle of Bull Run was fought in July, * 
Walt was at home ; and here he remained until 
George was wounded before Fredericksburg, 
Virginia, in December, 1862. That he was pro- 
foundly moved by the struggle is written clearly 
enough in Drum-Taps^ — a volume of verse 
which was chiefly composed before the end of 
1862, —^ and in many later prose memoranda.^ 
Whether he thought at first of enlisting is not 
known. On April 10, 1864, when engaged in 
heroic service as a volunteer nurse for soldiers, 
he wrote to his mother : " The war must be 
carried on, and I could willingly go myself in 
the ranks if I thought it would profit more than 
at present, and I don't know sometimes, but I 
shall as it is." No criticism of Whitman is more 
short-sighted than that which has condemned him 
for not personally shouldering a musket. That 
he had strength, courage, and patriotism, he 
amply proved, upon a field far more terrible 

i In H. B. Binns's Walt Whitman^ p. 181, there is printed, 
from the Harned MSS., a vow written in Whitman's note-book 
on April 16, 1861 : " I have this day, this hour, resolved to in- 
augurate for myself a pure, perfect, sweet, clean-blooded robust 
body, by ignoring all drinks but water and pure milk, and all 
fat meats, late suppers — a great body, a purged, cleansed, 
spiritualized, invigorated body." 



134 WALT WHITMAN 

than that of actual battle. But he had not " a 
warlike nature," — as Goethe quietly said of 
himself when reproached with not emulating 
Korner. It is inconceivable that he could have 
made an effective soldier. The requisite obedi- 
ence, swiftness of action, effacement of personal 
conviction, were not in him. His " call," as his 
Quaker forbears would have said, was to save 
life rather than to take it. So, through the 

" Year that trembled and reel'd beneath me," 

Whitman tarried with his mother, visiting his 
sick stage -drivers, reading the bulletins from the 
front, and describing in passionate verse the 
troops that marched proudly southward through 
Manhattan to preserve the old Union of the 
States. 

It was late in the second year of the war that 
the Whitmans, then living on Portland Avenue, 
Brooklyn, were startled by the news that George 
had been seriously wounded in an engagement 
of December 13th. Walt immediately left for 
the front. His pocket was picked in Philadel- 
phia, and he arrived in Washington without a 
dime. Here he lost two anxious days seeking 
information and assistance. Luckily he ran 
across his Boston friend, W. D. O'Connor, who 
had^ become a clerk in the Light-House Bureau. 
O'Connor, remarking cheerfully that a pick- 



WAR-TIME 135 

pocket who couldn't rob Walt ought to be 
ashamed of himself, helped the poet on his way. 
On the 19th he reached the camp of the 51st 
New York at Falmouth, Virginia, opposite Fred- 
ericksburg and about fifty miles from Washing- 
ton. George, a surly, tough-fibred captain of 
infantry, was already out of danger. Walt tele- 
graphed the good news home, and spent the next 
eight or nine days among the homesick and un- 
comfortably quartered troops. Their sufferings 
affected him deeply, and returning to Wash- 
ington in company with some of the wounded 
and penniless, he could not make up his mind to 
leave them. 

Mr. and Mrs. O'Connor hospitably offered 
him a room in their house, 394 L Street, near 
Fourteenth. Major Hapgood, an army paymas- 
ter, — whose temporary clerk was C. W. El- 
dridge, the now bankrupt publisher of the 1860 
edition of Leaves of Grass, — at once gave 
Whitman a desk in his office, with two or three 
hours' work a day in copying documents. In a 
few days he felt settled for an indefinite stay, 
and began to write long letters home about 
his " poor fellows " in the hospitals. He corre- 
sponded, too, with Brooklyn and New York 
papers, and did a little hack work for the local 
press. By February he secured letters to Seward, 
Chase, Sumner, and other political leaders, in 



136 WALT WHITMAN 

the hope of getting an office that would adequately 
support him ; but he hesitated, without backing 
of some sort, to present his letters to Seward 
and Chase, and though Sumner "talked and 
a'cted as though he had life in him," ^ it was two 
years before anything came of it. In March his 
mind seemed to go back wistfully to the manu- 
scripts he had left in Brooklyn. " Mother ^^ ^ he 
writes, " when you or Jeff write again, tell me 
if my papers and MSS. are all right ; I should 
be very sorry indeed if they got scattered or used 
up or anything — especially the copy of Leaves 
of Grass covered in blue paper, and the little 
MS. book Drum Taps, and the MS. tied up in 
the square, spotted (stone-paper) loose covers — 
I want them all carefully kept." 

But writing was, for the present, thrust to the 
background. During these early months of 1863 
Washington had become a huge hospital where 
more than fifty thousand sick and wounded sol- 
diers were suffering. Public buildings like the 
Patent Office, and even at times the Capitol, 
were pressed into service. There were more than 
a dozen great hospital barracks in the city itself ; 
one of the largest being the Armory Square hos- 
pital, near the present site of the Pennsylvania 
Railroad Station. Rude convalescent camps dot- 

1 Letter of W. to " JefE," Feb. 13, 1863. 

2 March 31, 1863. 



WAR-TIME 137 

ted the barren slopes beyond the city limits. 
The army surgeons and nurses did their best, 
but their resources were constantly over-taxed. 
: The situation was appalling. And here Whitman 
showed his noblest traits of character. Beginning 
with the Brooklyn boys whom he knew, he set out 
daily, on his own responsibility, to minister to 
the wounded. A natural nurse, and aided by his 
experience in visiting the sick in the old New 
York Hospital, he perceived at once the oppor- 
tunity for countless services for which the pro- 
fessional nurses had neither the time, the tact, nor 
the loving interest in individuals.^ He recog- 
nized no difference now between Rebels and 
Federals. He wrote last messages for the dying, 
and letters to sweethearts. For those who were 
able to write for themselves, he left paper and 
stamped envelopes. From the haversack which 
he carried on his daily and nightly rounds, he 
would take an orange, an apple, some lemons, 
a portion of tobacco, or some cheerful reading 
matter, and distribute them as there was need. 
Kindly people in Brooklyn, Boston, Salem, Prov- 
idence, — among them James Redpath, Emer- 

1 See Whitman's letters to the N. Y. Times, February 26, 
1863; Brooklyn Eagle, March 19, 1863; and Times, Dec. 11, 
1864. These, together with Whitman's letters in war-time to 
his mother, published under the title of " The Wound Dresstir," 
are printed in Volume VII of the Camden Edition. 



138 WALT WHITMAN 

son, ^ and Wendell Phillips, — sent him small 
sums of money for the most destitute soldiers. 
He had not much to give, at best, but he gave 
it with a loving word or look or caress, and 
passed on. Sometimes he would stay to read 
aloud, or to start the game of Twenty Questions. 
With the more critical cases he would sit for 
hours, soothing and cheering the tormented 
body with his calm, wholesome physical presence, 
and comforting the soul with tender sympathy. 
One of his letters to his mother, in the homely 
language which he always used to her, describes 
a typical incident. It has frequently been 
quoted : — 

" This afternoon, July 22d, I have spent a long 
time with Oscar F. Wilber, Company G, 154th 
New York, low with chronic diarrhoea and a 
bad wound also. He asked me to read him a 
chapter in the New Testament. I complied, and 
ask'd him what I should read. He said, ' Make 
your own choice.' I open'd at the close of one 
of the first books of the evangelists, and read 
the chapters describing the latter hours of Christ, 
and the scenes at the crucifixion. The poor, 
wasted young man ask'd me to read the follow- 
ing chapter also, how Christ rose again. I read 
very slowly, for Oscar was feeble. It pleased 

^ See the letters printed in T. Donaldson's Walt Whitman, 
the Man. New York, 1896. 



WAR-TIME 139 

him very much, yet the tears were in his eyes. 
He ask'd me if I enjoy'd religion. I said ' Per- 
haps not, my dear, in the way you mean, and 
yet, may-be, it is the same thing.' He said, ' It 
is my chief reliance.' He talked of death, and 
said he did not fear it. I said ' Why, Oscar, 
don't you think you will get well ? ' He said ' I 
may, but it is not probable.' He spoke calmly 
of his condition. The wound was very bad, it 
discharg'd much. Then the diarrhoea had pros- 
trated him, and I felt he was even then the same 
as dying. He behaved very manly and affection- 
ate. The kiss I gave him as I was about leaving 
he return'd fourfold. He gave me his mother's 
address, Mrs. Sally D. Wilber, Alleghany Post 
Office, Cattaraugus County, N. Y. I had several 
such interviews with him. He died a few days 
after the one just described." 

His working theory he described as " consci- 
entious personal investigation of cases, each for 
itself ; with sharp, critical faculties, but in the 
fullest spirit of human sympathy and boundless 
love." He believed that the mere presence of a 
strong, generous-souled man or woman, sending 
out invisible currents of affection, was better for 
the sick than any medicine. And many a hard- 
headed army surgeon, who closely watched the 
benignant gray-haired poet as he went his rounds, 
thought that he was right. 



140 WALT WHITMAN 

Months passed before he began to feel the 
daily drafts upon his splendid vitality. In the 
presence of death and dreadful operations he 
was able, he wrote his mother, to " keep singu- 
larly cool ; but often hours afterwards, perhaps 
when I am home or out walking alone, I feel 
sick and actually tremble when I recall the 
thing and have it in my mind again before me." 
By May the wounded from the bloody battle of 
Chancellorsville were brought to Washington, 
sometimes at the rate of a thousand men a day, 
and the doctors cautioned Whitman about re- 
maining too steadily in the air of the hospitals. 
But he determined to stay with his boys through 
the heated term. In July came the battle of 
Gettysburg. His hospitable friends, the O'Con- 
nors, moved to another house, but Walt lingered 
for a time in his tiny third-story room, getting 
his own breakfast, and buying one other meal a 
day at a restaurant. He was spending upon the 
sick every penny he could save. The old dream 
of making money by lecturing recurred again, 
but even he could see that it was an unpropi- 
tious time. 

The heat that summer grew terrific. Once in a 
while Whitman had a glimpse of Lincoln, who 
was staying by his post. " He looks more care- 
worn even than usual,*' he wrote, " his face with 
deep cut lines, seams, and his complexion gray 




THE " GARDNER " PORTRAIT OF WALT WHITMAN 



WAR-TIME 141 

through very dark skin — a curious looking man, 
very sad." In August Whitman's letters to his 
mother betrayed an unusual depression : " I be- 
lieve there is not much but trouble in this world, 
and if one has n't any for himself he has it made 
up by having it brought close to him through 
others, and that is sometimes worse than to have 
it touch one's self." His brother Andrew was 
seriously ill. " Jeff," who now had young chil- 
dren of his own, and was supporting the aged 
mother, was likely to be drafted for service. 
These home anxieties pressed upon Walt, and his 
tender heart revolted from the daily sight of the 
aftermath of war. " Mother, one's heart grows 
sick of war, after all, when you see what it 
really is ; every once in a while I feel so horri- 
fied and disgusted — it seems to me like a great 
slaughter-house and the men mutually butchering 
each other — then I feel how impossible it ap- 
pears, again, to retire from this contest, until we 
have carried our points (it is cruel to be so tossed 
from pillar to post in one's judgment)." 

So the months dragged by until October. He 
moved into new quarters, a garret room in a 
shabby tenement at 456 Sixth Street. He began 
to hunger for a sight of his mother. He had no 
money for the journey, but John Hay — then 
twenty-five, Lincoln's private secretary, and an 
admirer of Leaves of Grass — quietly arranged 



142 WALT WHITMAN 

for his transportation, as the following note 
shows : — 

Executive Mansion, Washington, October 9, 1863. 

. My dear O'Connor, — If you will come over 
to me I can arrange that matter for you. 
Yours truly, 

John Hay.^ 

Whitman stayed in Brooklyn about a month. 
He found his mother in good heart, but the life 
of cities seemed less satisfactory than of old. A 
new wave of creative impulse arose within him, 
and he felt once more that his true, if brief, voca- 
tion was that of a poet. Here is a striking letter 
to Charles W. Eldridge, hitherto unprinted : — 

Brooklyn, 

Nov. 17, 1863. 

Dear friend, 

I suppose Nelly has received a letter from me 
posting you up of my doings, &c. Any letters 
that come to me, up to Saturday next, please 
send on here. After that, do not send any, as 
I shall return Monday or Tuesday next. The 
weather here the last three days is very un- 
pleasant, sloppy and thick. I was at the opera 
last night, Trovatore — very, very good singing 
& acting. 

^ This note is endorsed in pencil by O'Connor : " Bel. get- 
ting ticket to N, Y.for W. TT." 



WAR-TIME 143 

I feel to devote myself more and more to the 
work of my life, which is making poems. I must 
bring out Drum Taps. I must be continually 
bringing out poems — now is the hey day — I 
shall range along the high plateau of my life and 
capacity for a few years now, & then swiftly de- 
scend. The life here in the cities, & the objects, 
&c of most, seem to me very flippant and shal- 
low somehow since I returned this time. . . . 
My New York boys are good, too good — if I 
staid here a month longer I should be killed with 
kindness. The great recompense of my journey 
here is to see my mother so well, & so bravely 
sailing on amid my troubles and discouragements 
like a noble old ship. My brother Andrew is 
bound for another world — he is here the greater 
part of the time. Charley I think sometimes to 
be a woman is greater than to be a man — is 
more eligible to greatness, not the ostensible 
article, but the real one. Dear Comrade I send 
you my love & to William & Nelly & remember 
me to Major. 

Walt. 

Early in December he was back in his Wash- 
ington garret. Andrew died just after his return, 
and Walt was homesick, but he took up again 
at once his volunteer task of nursing. J. T. Trow- 
bridge, for that month a guest in the mansion 



144 WALT WHITMAN 

of Secretary Chase, diagonally opposite to Whit- 
man's tenement, has given a vivid account of his 
visits to Walt and his endeavors to serve him.* 
Finding that Whitman still possessed Emerson's 
letters of recommendation to Sumner and Chase, 
— now nearly a year old, — Trowbridge urged 
upon the great Secretary Walt's claim to an 
appointment. But Chase thought he ought not 
to appoint to office a man who had written a 
" notorious " book ; and there the matter ended, 
Chase keeping Emerson's letter for the sake of 
the autograph. Whitman had already been read- 
ing aloud from his Drum-Taps MSS. to Trow- 
bridge, who, upon his return to Boston, tried in 
vain to j&nd a publisher for the volume. 

Driven by curiosity to see what was going on 
at the front, and thinking that he could be as 
useful there as at Washington, Whitman spent 
a few days in February, 1864, at Culpeper, Va. 
A letter ^ to Trowbridge gives his impressions : — 



Culpepper Va 

Feb 8 1864 

Dear friend 

I ought to have written to you before, ac- 
knowledging the good package of books, duly 
rec'd by express, & actively used since, changing 

1 Atlantic Monthly, February, 1902. Also printed in Trow- 
bridge's My Own Story. 2 Hitherto unprinted. 



WAR-TIME 146 

them around in places where most needed among 
the soldiers — (I found a small hospital of U S 
teamsters, entirely without reading, I go there 
considerable, & have given them largely of your 
reading contribution) — I am down here pretty 
well toward the extreme front of the Army, 
eight or ten miles south of headquarters (Brandy 
Station) — We had some fighting here (below 
here on picket lines) day before yesterday — We 
feared they the rebs were advancing upon us in 
our depleted condition, especially feared their 
making a flank movement up on our right. — 
We were all ready to skedaddle from here last 
night & expected it — horses harnessed in all 
directions, & traps packed up, (we have held & 
lost Culpepper three or four times already) — 
but I was very sleepy & laid down & went to 
sleep never slept fresher or sweeter — but orders 
came during the night to stay for the present, 
there was no danger — during the night I heard 
tremendous yells, I got up & went out, & found 
it was some of the men returning from the ex- 
treme front — as day before yesterday a strong 
force, three corps, were moved down there — 
there were portions of them now returning — it 
was a curious sight to see the shadowy columns 
coming in two or three o'clock at night — I 
talked with the men — how good, how cheerful, 
how full of manliness & good nature our Amer- 



146 WALT WHITMAN 

ican young men are — I staid last night at the 
house of a real secesh woman Mrs. Ashby — her 
husband (dead) a near relation of the famous 
reb Gen Ashby — she gave me a good supper & 
bed — there was quite a squad of our officers 
there — she & her sister paid me the compli- 
ment of talking friendlily & nearly altogether 
exclusively with me — she was dressed in very 
faded clothes but her manners were fine seems 
to be a traveled educated woman — quite melan- 
choly — said she had remained through fearful 
troubles & changes here on acct of her children 

— she is a handsome, middle-aged woman — 
poor lady, how I pitied her, compelled to live 
as one may say on chance & charity, with her 
high spirit. 

Dear friend I am moving around here among 
the field hospitals — (O how the poor young men 
suffer) — & to see more of camp life and war 
scenes, & the state of the army this winter — 
Dear friend I have much to tell you, but must 
abruptly close 

Walt Whitman 

Write to me same address Washington, D C 

— has Caleb Babbitt gone home from Mason 
Hospital — I left the book at Mr Chase's 

J. T. Trowbridge, 

Somerville, Massachusetts. 



WAR-TIME 147 

In the following month Grant was made com- 
mander-in-chief, and the war entered upon what 
proved to be its final period. "Grant is here. 
We expect fighting before long," Whitman wrote 
to his mother. The Army of the Potomac broke 
camp, and the campaign of the " Wilderness " 
began. "Others may say what they like," Walt 
wrote in April, " I believe in Grant and in Lincoln, 
too." The hospitals in Washington became more 
crowded than ever, and the Whitmans were 
sorely anxious over George, whose regiment was 
now doing some of Grant's kind of fighting. On 
May 20th, Walt, who had moved his quarters to 
a third story hall bedroom at 502 Pennsylvania 
Avenue, "a miserable place," wrote to Trow- 
bridge : — 

Washington 

May 20 1864 

Dear friend 

Your welcome gift of money for wounded 
here ($5) came safe to-day & is most acceptable 
— Most of wounded brought up here now are 
without a cent — Many of the cases appeal very 
strongly — (I sometimes think only one going 
among the men as I do, with personal feeling & 
my own way of investigation understands how 
deep & what sort the appeal is) — the hospitals 
are very full — Armory Square has more in- 
mates than many a well known New England 



148 WALT WHITMAN 

village — I go as usual to one or another hospital 

& to Alexandria, day & night — Dear friend, 

I shall always be glad to hear from you — 

Should you find any you know who are able & 

who feel to aid the wounded, through me, it 

would come very acceptable now — sure to 

reach addressed 

Walt Whitman 

Care Major Hapgood 

Paymaster U S Army 

Washington 

DC 

J T Tkowbridgb 
Somerville 

Massachusetts 

Less than a month thereafter, Whitman's hith- 
erto perfect health gave way, never to be wholly 
restored. A few sentences, from successive let- 
ters to his mother, tell the story: — 

" Mother, if this campaign was not in progress 
I should not stop here, as it is now beginning to 
tell a little upon me, so many bad wounds, many 
putrefied, and all kinds of dreadful ones, I have 
been rather too much with." 

" I believe I am homesick — something new 
for me — then I have seen all the horrors of 
soldiers' life and not been kept up by its excite- 
ment ..." 

" Mother, I have not felt well at all the last 



WAR-TIME 149 

week. I had spells of deathly faintness and bad 
trouble in my head too." 

" The doctor tells me I have continued too long 
in the hospitals, especially in a bad place, Armory 
building, where the worst wounds were, and have 
absorbed too much of the virus in my system." 

" I find it worse than I calculated." 

" The doctors have told me for a fortnight I 
must leave ; that I need an entire change of air, 
etc. I think I shall come home for a short time, 
and pretty soon." 

Returning to Brooklyn, Whitman remained 
there, slowly gaining strength, for the next six 
months. As cold weather came on he began to 
visit the military hospitals in and near New York. 
The Times for December 11 contained a long- 
delayed letter describing his Washington experi- 
ences. He wrote frequently to O'Connor and to 
Eldridge, telling of his progress toward recovery, 
and making frequent mention of Drum-Taps : 
" I intend to move heaven and earth to publish 
my Drum-Taps as soon as I am able to go 
around." The most interesting of these letters 
is dated on January 6, 1865.^ The opening para- 
graph refers to a new application for office, 
which was shortly to prove successful. 

1 I am indebted to Mrs. Ellen M. Calder, formerly Mrs. 
W. D. O'Connor, for this and many other unpublished letters 
to and from O'Connor. 



150 WALT WHITMAN 

Brooklyn, January 6, 1865. 

Dear friend : 

Your welcome letter of December SOth came 
safe. I have written and sent my application to 
Mr. Otto and also a few lines to Mr. Ashton 
with a copy of it. I am most desirous to get 
the appointment as enclosing with the rest of 
the points, my attention to the soldiers and to 
my poems, as you intimate. 

It may be Drum Taps may come out this 
winter yet (in the way I have mentioned in times 
past). It is in a state to put right through, a 
perfect copy being ready for the printer. I feel 
at last, and for the first time without any demur, 
that I am satisfied with it — content to have it 
go to the world verbatim and punctuatim. It is 
in my opinion superior to Leaves of Grass — 
certainly more perfect as a work of art, being 
adjusted in all its proportions and its passion 
having the indispensable merit that though to 
the ordinary reader let loose with wildest aban- 
don, the true artist can see that it is yet under 
control. But I am perhaps mainly satisfied with 
Drum Taps because it delivers my ambition of 
the task that has haunted me, namely, to express 
in a poem (and in the way I like, which is not at 
all by directly stating it), the pending action of 
this Time and Land we swim in^ with all their 
large conflicting fluctuations of despair and hope, 



WAR-TIME 151 

the shif tings, masses, and the whirl and deafening 
din, (yet over all, as by invisible hand, a definite 
purport and idea) with the unprecedented an- 
guish of wounded and suffering, the beautiful 
young men in wholesale death and agony, every- 
thing sometimes as if blood-color and dripping 
blood. The book is therefore unprecedentedly 
sad (as these days are, are they not?), but it 
also has the blast of the trumpet and the drum 
pounds and whirrs in it, and then an undertone 
of sweetest comradeship and human love threads 
its steady thread inside the chaos and is heard at 
every lull and interstice thereof. Truly also, it 
has clear notes of faith and triumph. 

Drum Taps has none of the perturbations of 
Leaves of Grass. I am satisfied with Leaves of 
Grass (by far the most of it) as expressing what 
was intended, namely, to express by sharp-cut self- 
assertion. One's- Self ^ and also, or may be, still 
more, to map out, to throw together for American 
use, a gigantic embryo or skeleton of Personality, 
fit for the West, for native models : but there are 
a few things I shall carefully eliminate in the next 
issue and a few more I shall considerably change. 

I see I have said I consider Drum taps supe- 
rior to Leaves of Grass. I probably mean ^ as a 
piece of art and from the more simple and 

^ (" I3 n't this deliciously characteristic of Wally I ! " W. D. 
O'C.) 



152 WALT WHITMAN 

winning nature of the subject and also because 
I have in it only, succeeded to my satisfaction in 
removing all superfluity — verbal superfluity, I 
mean. I delight to make a poem where I feel 
clear that not a word but is an indispensable 
part thereof and of my meaning. 

Still Leaves of Grass is dear to me, always 
dearest to me as my first-born, as daughter of my 
life's first hopes, doubts, and the putting in 
form of those days efforts and aspirations. True, 
I see now some things in it I should not put in 
if I were to write now, but yet I shall certainly 
let them stand, even if but for proofs of phases 
passed away.^ . . . 

A month later he was writing to Trowbridge 
from Washington : — 

Washington, Monday, 
Februai-y 6, 1865 

My dear friend : 

As you see by the date of this, I am back 
again in Washington, moving around regularly, 
but not to excess, among the hospitals. . . . My 
health is pretty good, but since I was prostrated 
last July, I have not had that unconscious and 
perfect health I formerly had. The physician 
says my system has been penetrated by the ma- 

^("Tliis is all about the book. The rest of the letter is 
family affairs, &c." W. D. O'C.) 



WAR-TIME 153 

laria, — it is tenacious, peculiar and somewhat 
baffling — but tells me it will go over in due 
time. It is my first appearance in the character 
of a man not entirely well. ... 

This was a happy month for Whitman. 
George, who had been for some time a prisoner 
of war, was exchanged, and then came the long- 
deferred appointment for Walt himself, to a 
clerkship in the Indian Bureau, in the Depart- 
ment of the Interior. He writes to Trowbridge 
on March 3 : — 

"I believe I told you I was working a few 
hours a day, a sufficiently remunerative desk in 
the Indian Office — I spend a couple of hours 
day or evening in the hospitals." 

The next day Lincoln took the oath of office 
for the second time. Whitman saw him driving 
from the Capitol. " He was in his plain two- 
horse barouche, and look'd very much worn and 
tired ; the lines, indeed, of vast responsibilities, 
intricate questions and demands of life and death, 
cut deeper than ever upon his dark brown face ; 
yet all the old goodness, tenderness, sadness and 
canny shrewdness, underneath the furrows." 

It was the last time, apparently, that he looked 
upon Lincoln's face. The two men had never 
spoken. Returning to Brooklyn for a few weeks 
to make final arrangements for printing Drum- 



164 WALT WHITMAN 

Taps at his own expense, Whitman was at home 
with his mother when the news came on the 
morning of April 15 that the President had been 
shot the night before. 

"Mother prepared breakfast — and other 
meals afterward — as usual ; but not a mouth- 
ful was eaten all day by either of us. We each 
drank half a cup of coffee ; that was all. Little 
was said. We got every newspaper morning and 
evening, and the frequent extras of that period, 
and pass'd them silently to each other." 

It was lilac-time in the straggling, half -rural 
Brooklyn streets, and the sight and odor of the 
blossoms were at once and forever associated, 
in Whitman's mind, with the tragedy. The first 
edition of Drum- Taps * was already printing, but 
Whitman began immediately to compose the 
Lincoln dirge " When Lilacs Last in the Door- 
Yard Bloomed," as well as the briefer lyric 
upon the dead leader, entitled " O Captain ! 
My Captain." These, with a few other less 
notable pieces, formed the Sequel to Drum- 
Taps^ which was separately printed, but is often 
bound with the unsold copies of the first edition. 

This book fitly summarizes the profound im- 

1 Walt Whitman's Drum-Taps, New York, 1865. 

^ Sequel to Drum-Taps (Since the preceding' came from the 
press), When Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard Bloom' d and Other 
Poems, Washington, 1865-66. 



WAR-TIME 

pression made upon Whitman's mind by the 
long conflict. As we have seen, it was eighteen 
months after the war began before he went to 
Washington. For two periods of a few days 
each he was at the front, though he saw no ac- 
tual fighting. Previous to April, 1865, he had 
spent about twenty months, all told, in daily 
ministrations to the sick, utilizing all the time 
and strength that remained to him after the 
hours of hack work by which he had earned a 
wretched living. During this period he made, 
according to his own diaries, about six hundred 
visits to the hospitals, and ministered to between 
eighty and a hundred thousand sick and wounded. 
But all such figures fail to show the terrible 
drama of hopes, fears, and sorrows which he 
witnessed at close view, and in which he person- 
ally shared. " The real war," as he himself 
said, " will never get in the books." Yet Walt 
Whitman's Drum- Taps embody the very spirit 
of the civil conflict, picturing war with a poig- 
nant realism, a terrible and tender beauty, such 
as only the great masters of literature have been 
able to compass. 

Here the reader may still feel the electric shock 
of that first alarm, as the drums and bugles 
sound ; the ideal passion for the Flag ; the sinewy 
tread of the volunteer soldiery, moving so ma- 
jestically that it seems as if Democracy, or even 



o WALT ^VHITMAN 

Mankind itself, were rising from its lethargy. 
Here are the pictured march and fight : the 
cavalry crossing the ford, the crashing and smok-'', 
ing artillery, the bivouac, the field hospital at ' 
night, the vigil, and the gaunt, ivory faces of the 
dead. There is no sectional anger or hatred, but 
rather a prophecy, even in the midst of carnage, 
of an ultimate reconciliation and comradeship. 
Yet in the meantime the tyagic penalty must be 
paid in full, and paid by the innocent ; the homely 
pathos of "Come up from the fields, Father" 
is such that no American with a memory can 
read it without tears. Most of the poems in 
Drum- Taps are brief, restrained, and subdued 
to a rhythmical — sometimes even a metrical — 
regularity unusual in Whitman's verse. " Ethio- 
pia Saluting the Colors," and " O Captain ! 
My Captain ! " are almost conventional in their 
structure; and the latter, on this account, has 
had a wide popularity among readers who are 
indifferent to Whitman's other and more charac- 
teristic productions. For solemnity and power 
no poem in the little volume is comparable to the 
threnody, "When Lilacs Last in the Door- Yard 
Bloom'd," which Swinburne, under the spell of 
his first enthusiasm for Whitman, called "the 
most sonorous nocturn ever chanted in the church 
of the world." The lilacs of April, the star 
drooping in the west, the hermit-thrush singing 



WAR-TIME 157 

in the cedar swamp, are the three motifs of the 
dirge : — 

" Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my 
soul." 

It remains, with Lowell's Commemoration Ode^ 
as the finest imaginative product of the Civil 
War period. Never but once before, in " Out of 
the Cradle Endlessly Kocking," and never after- 
ward, was Whitman capable of such sustained 
and deep-toned recitative, varied with lyric in- 
terludes of such pure beauty. The grief at the 
passing of the great President becomes ennobled 
and transfigured into a song of praise : — 

Come lovely and soothing deaths 

Undulate round the world, serenely arrivingy arriving^ 

In the day, in the night, to ally to each. 

Sooner or later delicate death. 

Praised he the fathomless universe, 
For life and Joy, and for objects and knowledge curious, 
And for love, sweet love — but praise ! praise ! praise ! 
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding death. 



CHAPTER V 
THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 

" Well, I read your poet and his praises, and I mention him 
in places where his name was never heard, and I argue and 
assert, and defy, and declaim, — and if I do not wholly convert 
myself, I do at least open some generous minds to consider. 
I watch the fight in England with curious interest." — George 
William Curtis to W. D. O'Connor, October 3, 1867. 

The close of the war brought no immediate 
changes into Whitman's life. For many months 
the calls to hospital service seemed as compel- 
ling as ever, and he continued his visitations. 
But little by little the strain relaxed, until at 
last he found himself bound to only a few con- 
valescents, whom he used to visit on Sunday 
afternoons. For the Sunday dinner or tea he 
was a frequent guest at the friendly table of 
the O'Connors, who had shown unfailing kind- 
ness since his arrival in Washington, penniless 
and distressed, in December of 1862. O'Connor 
was then thirty, — "a gallant, handsome, gay- 
hearted, fine-voiced, glowing-eyed man; lithe- 
moving on his feet, of healthy and magnetic 
atmosphere and presence, and the most welcome 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 159 

company in the world. " ^ His ambitious novel, 
Harrington^ which Thayer and Eldridge had 
published in 1860, had proved a practical failure, 
and he was burying his brilliant talents in the 
routine work of his clerkship, first in the Light- 
House Bureau, and afterward in the Life-Saving 
Service, of which he was assistant superintend- 
ent at the time of his death, in 1889.^ O'Connor 
was a wide reader, and had the Irish gift of ready, 
eloquent speech.^ His charming wife ^ used to 
mend Whitman's socks, and tended him during 
all the months that he stayed under their roof, 
as a mother might her big, dreamy, careless boy. 
A " superb woman " he called her in 1888, 
" without shams, brags : just a woman. Ellen 
does not write : that gives her more time to get 
at the essentials of life." 

At the O'Connors' Whitman often met Charles 
Eldridge, the unlucky publisher, who after end- 
ing his clerkship under Paymaster Hapgood, se- 
cured a place in the Internal Revenue office : " a 

1 Frose Wcyrks, p. 511. 

2 A volume of tales of rescue, compiled by C. W. Eldridge 
from O'Connor's annual Reports, was published in Boston, 
1904, under the title Heroes of the Storm. 

8 A lifelong friend of O'Connor writes me : "He was a man 
of full and rich attainments, and a genius — needing only a 
brake on his prodigal and affluent expression. He gave up the 
better part of his career to Whitman — whom he excelled in 
humanity, aspiration, and self -surrender." 

* Now Mrs. Ellen M. Calder. 



160 WALT WHITMAN 

thoroughly good and true man — has some ways 
and notions of his own, but the main things are 
as solid as the hills." ^ Hither, too, came E. C. 
Stedman, already editor and war correspondent, 
and later to be known as banker, poet, man of 
letters, and one of Whitman's most sane and 
illuminating critics. 

John Burroughs was another member of the 
kindly little circle of Government employes. A 
farmer's son, he had published at twenty-three an 
unsigned Atlantic essay on " Expression " which 
was widely attributed to Emerson, in whose writ- 
ings he had steeped himself. In 1863, at twenty- 
six, he had taught school, tried his hand at jour- 
nalism, and settled in Washington as a clerk in the 
Treasury. He had already received from Leaves 
of Grass such an impression as no other book had 
ever made on him. Rambling in the woods near 
Washington one Sunday afternoon, he encoun- 
tered Whitman, who, with his haversack slung 
over his shoulder, was tramping off to an outly- 
ing hospital. Burroughs joined him, and a friend- 
ship began which ended only with Whitman's 
life. In the easy-going years that followed the 
war, Walt frequently breakfasted on Sundays 
with Mr. and Mrs. Burroughs ; invariably arriv- 
ing late, io the housekeeper's distress, but bring- 
ing such radiant good spirits with him that he 
was invariably forgiven. 

1 " Calamus," Camden Edition, vol. viii, p. 112. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 161 

Contrasting sharply with these friendships for 
book-loving persons was Whitman's intimacy 
with Peter Doyle. Doyle still survives, a big, 
warm-hearted Irishman, baggage-master on the 
Colonial and Federal express from Washington 
to Boston. The son of a blacksmith in Alexan- 
dria, Peter was but eighteen in 1865. The close 
of the war found him a Confederate prisoner on 
parole in Washington, and earning two dollars 
a day as conductor of a horsecar. As Whitman 
was returning from John Burroughs's house, one 
stormy night, in Doyle's car, a sudden impulse 
led the young conductor to sit down by his soli- 
tary passenger. Each was lonely, and each un- 
derstood without words the other's craving for 
friendship. For the next half-dozen years they 
were almost daily companions in leisure hours. 
At night they would tramp the country roads, 
while Whitman talked about the stars or spouted 
Shakespeare. The minor conventions had no 
terrors for this pair. "We would tackle the 
farmers who came into town, buy a water-melon, 
sit down on the cellar-door of Bacon's grocery, 
Seventh and Pennsylvania Avenue, halve it and 
eat it. People would go by and laugh. Walt 
would only smile and say, * They can have the 
laugh — we have the melon.' " * Doyle's testi- 

1 Preface to Calamus. Edited by R. M. Bucke. Boston, 
Laurens Maynard, 1897. 



162 WALT WHITMAN 

mony as to Whitman's habits is conclusive for 
this period. "I never knew a case of Walt's 
being bothered up by a woman. Woman in that 
sense never came into his head. Walt was too 
clean, he hated anything which was not clean. 
No trace of any kind of dissipation in him. I 
ought to know about him those years — we were 
awful close together. . . . He had pretty vigor- 
ous ideas on religion ... he never went to 
church — did n't like form, ceremonies — did n't 
seem to favor preachers at all. I asked him 
about the hereafter, ' There must be something,' 
he said. ' There can't be a locomotive unless 
there is somebody to run it.' I have heard him 
say that if a person was the right kind of per- 
son — and I guess he thought all persons right 
kind of persons — he could n't be destroyed in 
the next world nor in this." * 

Whitman's letters to this loyal, loving young 
Irishman have been reprinted under the title 
Calamus. Better than any far-fetched theoriz- 
ing, they expound Whitman's doctrine of manly 
friendship, as laid down in the " Calamus" group 
of his poems. No series of Walt's letters, except 
those written to his mother, so thoroughly reveal 
the simple affection which furnished the basis of 
his far from simple character. It was natural to 
him to spend long hours with a wholesome illit- 
1 Rid. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 163 

erate boy whom he liked. It was instinctive — 
however affected or mawkish it might be in an- 
other — to address Peter Doyle as " dear baby," 
" dearest boy," " my darling son." To sit with 
Pete on the shady side of Pennsylvania Avenue, 
cutting a watermelon and smiling back at the 
smiling passers-by, was Whitman's version of 

" A book of Verses underneath the Bough, 
A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread — and Thou 

Beside me singing in the Wilderness — 
Oh, Wilderness were Paradise enow! " 

And Paradise for Paradise, it is not clear that 
Omar had the better of it. 

To expect that a poet should be always " lit- 
erary," or desirous of literary company, is to 
betray a singular ignorance of that irritable 
tribe. Many of Whitman's daily companions, in 
the years of his clerkship, refused — as, indeed, 
many persons still refuse — to consider him a 
poet at all. His home was now in a pleasant 
boarding-house at M and Twelfth streets, which 
sheltered several young men of a literary turn of 
mind. They frequently discussed their fellow 
boarder. One of the survivors of this group 
notes : * " We did not think very highly of his 
writings and found in them more matter for 
amusement than for instruction. But we all 

1 Thomas Proctor, in The Journal of Hygiene, February, 
1898. 



\ 



164 WALT WHITMAN 

liked the man. . . . He seldom started any 
topic, hardly ever led, and was never obtrusive. 

. . . He never complained of feeling ill or out 
of sorts. . . . He used no tobacco or wine. . . . 
lie was always chaste in speech, and that he was 
a clean man physically and morally was the 
impression he made on the minds of all of us. 

... I never saw him engaged in reading, or 
have any literature in his possession, not even 
a newspaper. . . . Leisureliness in everything 
was one of his striking characteristics. Some 
of us thought that he was physically lazy and 
mentally hazy." It may be added that the 
author of these reminiscences, receiving from 
Whitman in 1868 the gift of an autographed 
copy of Drum-Taps^ did not take the trouble 
to open the book for the next thirty years. 

But the agreeable routine of the first summer 
of Whitman's clerkship was rudely interrupted. 
His work in the Indian Bureau had never been 
arduous, and he some times worked at his desk 
upon a copy of the 1860 edition of Leaves of 
GrasSf which he was slowly revising for a new 
edition. Someone called the attention of the 
chief of the department to the fact that the 
gray-haired clerk was the author and possessor 
of an immoral book. It was taken from his desk 
after office hours, and examined by the Secre- 
tary. The result was the following note. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 166 

Depaktment of the Interiob, 
Washington, D. C, June 30th, 1865. 

The services of Walter Whitman, of New 
York, as a clerk in the Indian Office, will be 
dispensed with from and after this date. 

Jas. Harlan, 
Secretary of the Interior. 

Harlan, an able lawyer and former United 
States Senator, who had once served for two years 
as president of Iowa Wesleyan University, was 
probably within his technical privilege ^ in dis- 
missing Whitman, whatever may be thought of 
searching a clerk's desk in his absence. But 
his action was certainly narrow-minded and un- 
just. To the protest of one of Whitman's friends, 
J. H. Ashton, then assistant in the Attorney- 
General's office, Harlan angrily replied that he 
would himself resign before reinstating the clerk. 
Whereupon Ashton quietly secured for Whit- 
man a clerkship in the Attorney-General's office, 
and the incident was apparently closed. Outside 
of a dozen friendly newspaper men, few people 
in Washington heard or cared about Whitman's 
trouble with his chief. But to the chivalrous 
William O'Connor, what had happened was not 

1 In a letter written in 1894, Mr. Harlan said that Whitman 
was dismissed " on the ground that his services were not needed. 
And no other reason was ever assigned by my authority." See 
Mr. Leon Vincent's American Literary Masters, p. 488. 



166 WALT WHITMAN 

only an insult to his friend, but an outrage upon 
the Liberty of Literature. For nine weeks 
O'Connor nursed his wrath, and then, with a 
pamphlet whose very title, The Good Gray 
Poet^ ^ was a stroke of genius, he rode into the 
lists against the Secretary, In the whole history 
of literary controversy there have been few 
more brilliant pamphlets. He begins by describ- 
ing Whitman's personal appearance upon the 
streets of Washington, and how Lincoln, seeing 
him for the first time, said in his quaint, sweet 
tone, ''Well, he looks like a Man! " Then fol- 
lows a depiction of Whitman's character, and 
the circumstances of his dismissal. Admitting 
that some eighty lines out of a total of about 
nine thousand published by Whitman might be 
objectionable to a " malignant virtue," O'Con- 
nor passes in swift survey the work of the world's 
most famous writers, and finds that none of them 
escape the same indictment. The debased taste 
of the nineteenth century would " expurgate " 
them all. 

No extracts do justice to the sustained heat 
and glow of O'Connor's rhetoric, but the twen- 
tieth century reader may be interested in his 

^ Dated September 2, 1865, but published with the imprint 
" New York : Bimce and Huntington, 1866." It was afterward 
reprinted, with some changes, in R. M. Bucke's Walt Whit- 
man, New York, 1883. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 167 

picture of the colonialism of all American 
literature except Leaves of Grass. 

" Every other book by an American author 
implies, both in form and substance, I cannot 
even say the European, but the British mind. 
The shadow of Temple Bar and Arthur's Seat 
lies dark on all our letters. Intellectually, we 
are stiU a dependency of Great Britain, and one 
word — colonial — comprehends and stamps our 
literature. In no literary form, except our news- 
papers, has there been anything distinctively 
American. I note our best books — the works of 
Jefferson, the romances of Brockden Brown, the 
speeches of Webster, Everett's rhetoric, the 
divinity of Channing, some of Cooper's novels, 
the writings of Theodore Parker, the poetry of 
Bryant, the masterly law arguments of Lysander 
Spooner, the miscellanies of Margaret Fuller, 
the histories of Hildreth, Bancroft and Motley, 
Ticknor's History of Spanish Literature, the 
political treatises of Calhoun, the rich, benig- 
nant poems of Longfellow, the ballads of 
Whittier, the delicate songs of Philip Pendleton 
Cooke, the weird poetry of Edgar Poe, the 
wizard tales of Hawthorne, Irving' s Knicker- 
bocker, Delia Bacon's splendid sibyllic book on 
Shakespeare, the political economy of Carey, 
the prison letters and immortal speech of John 
Brown, the lofty patrician eloquence of Wendell 



168 WALT WHITMAN 

Phillips, and those diamonds of the first water, 
the great clear' essays and greater poems of 
Emerson. This literature has often command- 
ing merits, and much of it is very precious to 
me ; but in respect of its national character, all 
that can be said is that it is tinged, more or less 
deeply, with America ; and the foreign model, 
the foreign standards, the foreign culture, the 
foreign ideas, dominate over it all." 

Then follows a long and moving description 
of Whitman's services in the hospitals, closing 
with this passage : — 

" Not for him, perhaps, the recognition of his 
day and generation. But a life and deeds like 
his, lightly esteemed by men, seek deep into 
the memory of Man. Great is the stormy fight 
of Zutphen; it is the young lion of English 
Protestantism springing in haughty fury for 
the defence of the Netherlands from the bloody 
ravin of Spain ; but Philip Sidney passing the 
flask of water from his own lips to the dying 
soldier looms gigantic, and makes all the fore- 
ground of its noble purpose and martial rage ; 
and whatever may be the verdict of the present, 
sure am I that hereafter and to the latest ages, 
when Bull Run and Shiloh and Port Hudson, 
when Vicksburg and Stone Biver and Fort 
Donelson, when Pea Ridge and Chancellorsville 
and Gettysburg and the Wilderness, and the 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 169 

great march from Atlanta to Savannah, and 
[Richmond rolled in flame, and all the battles 
for the life of the Republic against her last 
internal foe, are gathered up in accumulated 
terraces of struggle upon the mountain of his- 
tory, well relieved against those bright and 
bloody tumultous giant tableaux, and all the 
dust and thunder of a noble war, the men and 
women of America will love to gaze upon the 
stalwart form of the good gray poet, bending to 
heal the hurts of their wounded and soothe the 
souls of their dying, and the deep and simple 
words of the last great martyr will be theirs — 
' Well, he looks like a Man ! ' " 

The pamphlet ends with these words : — 
" I claim that to expel an author from a pub- 
lic office and subject him to public contumely, 
solely because he has published a book which no 
one can declare immoral without declaring all the 
grand books immoral, is to affix a penalty to 
thought, and to obstruct the freedom of letters. 
. . . Difference of opinion there may and must 
be upon the topics which in this letter I have 
grouped around it, but upon the act itself there 
can be none. As I drag it up here into the sight 
of the world, I call upon every scholar, every 
man of letters, every editor, every good fellow 
everywhere who wields the pen, to make common 
cause with me in rousing upon it the full tempest 



170 WALT WHITMAN 

of reprobation it deserves. I remember Tennyson, 
a spirit of vengeance over the desecrated grave 
of Moore ; I think of Scott rolling back the tide 
of obloquy from Byron ; I see Addison gilding 
the blackening fame of Swift; I mark South- 
ampton befriending Shakespeare ; I recall Du 
Bellay enshielding Rabelais; I behold Hutten 
fortressing Luther ; here is Boccaccio lifting the 
darkness from Dante, and scattering flame on 
his foes in Florence ; this is Bembo protecting 
Pomponatius ; that is Grostete enfolding Roger 
Bacon from the monkish fury ; there, covered 
with light, is Aristophanes defending ^Eschylus ; 
and if there lives aught of that old chivalry of 
letters, which in all ages has sprung to the succor 
and defence of genius, I summon it to act the 
part of honor and duty upon a wrong which, done 
to a single member of the great confraternity of 
literature, is dqne to all, and which flings insult 
and menace upon every immortal page that dares 
transcend the wicked heart or the constricted 
brain. I send this letter to Victor Hugo for its 
passport through Europe ; I sen4 it to John 
Stuart Mill, to Newman, and Matthew Arnold, 
for England ; I send it to Emerson and Wendell 
Phillips ; to Charles Sumner ; to every Senator 
and Representative in Congress ; to all our jour- 
nalists ; to the whole American people ; to every- 
one who guards the freedom of letters and the 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 171 

liberty of thought throughout the civilized 
world. God grant that not in vain upon this 
outrage do I invoke the judgment of the mighty 
spirit of literature, and the fires of every honest 
heart ! 

"William Douglas O'Connor." 

O'Connor's style is that of the Celt who sees 
red. Nevertheless, to belittle a masterpiece like 
The Good Gray Poet because it is rhetorical 
is as much beside the mark as to criticise an 
orator for being oratorical. Yet the "civilized 
world " received the pamphlet with something of 
the same indifference which the House of Com- 
mons used to manifest toward the impassioned 
harangues of Edmund Burke. It was months 
before O'Connor could find a publisher. In the 
mean time he wrote fiery letters to many persons 
whose influence he wished to enlist upon Whit- 
man's side. From their replies ^ a few may well 
be selected for presentation here, in view of 
their bearing upon the wider question of Whit- 
man's reception by his countrymen. George 
William Curtis, who had a soul as chivalrous as 
O'Connor's, as well as a tact, delicacy, and hu- 
mor which O'Connor sometimes lacked, wrote 
from his summer home in Ashfield : — 

1 Kindly placed at my disposal by Mrs. Calder. 



172 WALT WHITMAN 

AsHFiELD, Mass., 30 Sept., 1865. 

My dear O'Connor, — Here, up among the 
autumn hills, I got your interesting letter of 
the 2d, and you may be very sure that I will do 
all I can to redress the wrong of which you 
speak. 

The task you undertake is not easy, as you 
know. The public sympathy will be with 
the Secretary for removing a man who will 
be considered an obscene author and a free 
lover. But your hearty vindication of Free Let- 
ters will not be the less welcome to all liberal 
men. 

Personally I do not know Whitman, and while 
his " Leaves of Grass " impressed me less than 
it impressed many better men than I, I have 
never heard anything of him but what was 
noble, nor believed anything of him but what was 
honorable. That a man should be expelled 
from office and held up to public contumely, be- 
cause of an honest book which no candid mind 
can truly regard as hurtful to public morality, 
is an offence which demands exposure and cen- 
sure. . . . 

Goodbye. Let me hear as soon as you will. 
You know how gladly I shall serve you, & how 
truly I am 

Your friend 

G. W. Curtis. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 173 

In another month Curtis had received the 
manuscript of The Good Gray Poet, in O'Con- 
nor's bold flowing hand. He acknowledged it as 
follows : — 

North Shore, Sunday, 29 Oct., 1865. 

My dear O'Connor, — Last evening came 
your note from Chelsea & the MS. for which 
the printer (if he ever sees it I !) will invoke 
benedictions upon your head. I read it all be- 
fore I went to bed. The rhetoric is gorgeous. 
Its estimate of the bard of course entirely out- 
runs any present appreciation of him by that 
public which reads. The one to which he is now 
so dear — the public, not the occasional private 
like you — is not a reading body. 

For my own part I read your lofty praise 
with admiration and shame that I could be so 
blind to so great a glory. I shall read the Drum- 
Taps with double interest. 

Now that I have read what you have written, 
I do not feel that it will probably imperil your 
situation — whether you care for it or not. You 
criticise Mr. Harlan from a purely impersonal 
point, as a fool may easily see. 

For the substance of the work, you marshal a 
splendid array of "indecent" witnesses, and 
bravely accuse all the Great Gods of "nastiness." 
But I asked myself, as I read, two questions : 



174 WALT WHITMAN 

First, is there no natural reticence about these 
sexual relations and organs, — and second, is the 
sense of various power in the greatest authors 
at aU increased by their use of such allusions 
as metaphors or otherwise ? Is it a prudery or 
an instinct which secretes the whole matter? 

I cannot but doubt if any publisher would 
like to stem the torrent of censure which the 
book will probably draw upon him. But while I 
shall frankly tell him its scope I shall do full 
justice to the feeling which I have for the true 
purpose which dictates it and the copious rich- 
ness with which it is done. Neither you nor it 
will suffer in my mouth. 

I don't believe any man deserves to be 
spoken of as you speak of your hero, but it must 
be a delight to you to feel that I am wrong. 
Goodbye. I shall report as soon as I can. 
Always yours, 
G. W. Curtis. 

W. D. O'Connor, Esq., 
Chelsea, Mass. 

Finally Bunce and Huntington, of New York, 
issued the pamphlet. Curtis acknowledged its 
receipt in the following note : — 

North Shore, Staten Island, 

12 February, 1866. 

My dear O'Connor, — I am ashamed of 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 175 

myself that I have not long ago acknowledged 
The Good Gray Poet, The truth is that I have 
been racing about the country and intended to 
have expressed my opinion in the Weekly. But 
I find that it is not practicable to do so. I am 
sorry, because altho I do not agree, with your 
opinions altogether, I do most heartily sympa- 
thize with your generous & eloquent defence of 
Free Letters. 

I see that the pamphlet has excited attention 
— not indeed as much as I hoped, but you know 
what a lottery publicity is. The Nation^ The 
Round Tahle^ The Commonwealth^ I suppose 
you have seen, and I should have been very 
glad to add H.^s W. to the number. 

I heard it discussed among the Dii majores in 
Boston, but they do not believe in your poet. 
Lowell told me that he first remembered Whit- 
man in the old Democratic Review. That was 
new to me, as I supposed the Leaves of Grass 
was his maiden speech. 

Good bye. I should be glad to know how you 
are satisfied with the reception of your volley, 
and am always 

Most truly yours, 

G. W. Curtis.^ 

W. D. O'Connor, Esq., 
Treasury Department, 
Washington, D. C. 



176 WALT WHITMAN 

Wendell Phillips, himself a master of polemic 
eloquence, wrote to O'Connor in June, 1866, 
after reading the pamphlet a second time : — 

" I still think it is the most brilliant and vig- 
orous effort I know of in controversial literature. 
... It is one of those essays struck out in the 
heat of a great emergency which survive the oc- 
casion and take their place in living literature. 
. . . You ought to have been a speaker. Marry 
your style to a living voice, and we talkers will 
aU take back seats." 

The attitude of keensighted journalists at this 
juncture is well shown in a letter from the vig- 
orous editor of the New York Times. O'Con- 
nor had sent him 77ie Good Gray Poet, and 
prepared an article on the forthcoming new 
edition of Leaves of Grass, 

The Times Office, New York, Oct. 16, 1866. 

My dear Mr. O'Connor, — I am a little puz- 
zled by your proposition about Leaves of Grass. 
It is not a new book and has to encounter a good 
deal of prejudice. I am not blind to its merits, 
though I do not rate it so highly as you do. But 
there are sundry nastinesses in it which will & 
ought to keep it out of libraries and parlors : and 
P should not like to praise the book without 
branding them. I know how you defend, or 
excuse, them — but I don't think the defence 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 177 

valid coram populo, Shakespeare, Montaigne & 
others might do in their day, what no man 
can now^ innocently. Other very gross acts are 
natural and proper in their place but that place 
is not in public. 

So much for that. If you will pardon my hesi- 
tation I would be very glad to see your review 
and will print it if I can. Don't make it too 
long. Newspaper columns do not suffice to ex- 
haust such a subject. What you said of W. per- 
sonally in your pamphlet was as fine as anything 
I ever read. I would rather deserve all that than 
be Emperor. 

Yours very truly, 

H. J. Kaymond. 

W. D. O'CoNKOR, Esq., 
Office Light House Board, 
Treasury Dept., Washington. 

Among the acknowledgments of The Good 
Gray Poet made by foreign men of letters, Mat- 
thew Arnold's is very perfect of its kind. 

Athen^um Club, Pall Mall, S. W., Sept. 16, 1866. 

Dear Sir, — I have been absent from Lon- 
don for some months, and on my return I find 
your note of the 4th of June with the two books 
you have been good enough to send me. Their 
predecessors, which you mention, I do not find. 

Mr. Harlan is now, I believe, out of office, but 



178 WALT WHITMAN 

had he still remained in office I can imagine 
nothing less likely to make him reconsider his 
decision respecting your friend than the interfer- 
ence of foreign expostulators in the matter. I 
have read your statement with interest and I do 
not contest Mr. Walt Whitman's powers and 
originality. I doubt, however, whether here, too, 
or in France, or in Germany, a public function- 
ary would not have had to pay for the pleasure 
of being so outspoken the same penalty which 
your friend has paid in America. As to the gen- 
eral question of Mr. Walt Whitman's poetical 
achievements, you will think that it savours of 
our decrepit old Europe when I add that while 
you think it his highest merit that he is so unlike 
anyone else, to me this seems to be his demerit ; 
no one can afford in literature to trade merely on 
his own bottom and to take no account of what 
the other ages and nations have acquired : a great 
original literature America will never get in this 
way, and her intellect must inevitably consent to 
come, in a considerable measure, into the Euro- 
pean movement. That she may do this and yet 
be an independent intellectual power, not merely 
as you say an intellectual colony of Europe, I 
cannot doubt ; and it is on her doing this, and 
not on her displaying an eccentric and violent 
originality that wise Americans should in my 
opinion set their desires. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 179 

With many thanks for the good will towards 
me which you express, I am, dear sir, 

Very faithfully yours, 
Matthew Aenold. 

W. D. O'Connor, Esq., 

Washington, D. C, 

United States. 

To this deft instruction O'Connor replied 
(October 14, 1866) in a long and, for him, tem- 
perate argument, from which a single paragraph 
at least may be quoted : — 

" I can't agree that America must come into the 
European movement, as you say, for, and I am 
sorry so many Englishmen are blind to it, Amer- 
ica has a movement of her own, the source of her 
life, the secret of her power, and I think, if you 
will pardon me for saying so, there is far more 
need and probability of Europe coming into our 
movement, than we into hers. Democracy, true 
or false, is the doctrine or principle in which 
this country has its start, and her movement, in 
literature as in everything else, must proceed 
and be sustained from it, and not from anything 
exterior to it. As well expect that our flora 
and fauna should derive from the influences 
of another zone, as that our letters, or any form 
of our life, should -find its inspiration and sus- 
tenance from the central forces of foreign 
lands." 



180 WALT WHITMAN 

The Rev. Moncure D. Conway, who had so 
promptly called upon Whitman in 1855, was 
now living in London. O'Connor sent him the 
pamphlet, and learned with delight that Mr. 
Conway had already written an article on 
Whitman — still unpublished — for the Fort- 
nigJitly Review^ then under the editorship of 
G. H. Lewes. The Fortnightly article appeared 
on October 15. It was laudatory, but con- 
tained some journalistic exaggerations. O'Con- 
nor wrote of it to Trowbridge : " Conway's 
article in the Fortnightly is a frightful mass 
of misstatement and fiction, redeemed by the 
Conwegian good-nature and good intentions." 
Lord Strangford published at the same time in 
the Pall Mall Gazette an able though unsigned 
commendation of Whitman's work. 

The little group of loyal fellow-clerks at 
Washington took heart. The tireless O'Connor 
succeeded in getting the New York Times to 
publish (on December 2) his review of the new 
edition.^ The Galaxy printed (December 1) 
an enthusiastic review by John Burroughs, 
whose little book, Notes on Walt Whitman as 
Poet and Person^"^ was now in manuscript, 
awaiting a publisher. Walt wrote to his mother 
on December 10 : "It seems as if things 

1 Ready in the late autumn of 1866, but dated 1867. 

2 New York, 1867. Second edition, 1871. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 181 

were going to brighten up about Leaves of 
Grass:' 

The poet himself was, in fact, the least ex- 
cited of the circle. He accepted their champion- 
ship with a sort of royal calm. He was now 
a third-class clerk, drawing 11600 a year. For 
the first time in his life he was saving money. 
His boarding place was comfortable. His offi- 
cial desk was at a great south window on 
the third story of the Treasury Building, afford- 
ing a spacious view down the shining Potomac. 
The Treasury guards allowed him free access to 
his office at night, and the old reading habits of 
his boyhood asserted themselves. He writes to 
his mother in those homely, jerky sentences 
which he doubtless knew she preferred to any 
other : — 

" I go evenings up to the office frequently — 
I have got me a splendid astral lamp, to burn 
gas by a tube & it works to admiration, (all at 
the expense of the office) — & there I can sit, 
& read &c, as nice as you please — then I am 
getting many books for the Library (our office 
Library) that I have long wanted to read at 
my leisure, — and can get any book I want in 
reason — so you see it is a great privilege I 
have here." 

Outwardly judged, here was no poet of revolt, 
surely, nor even a martyr ; but a large, bland, 



182 WALT WHITMAN 

comfortable personage, neariog fifty, and skill- 
fully allowing the reunited nation to pay for 
Lis gas and bis books. But while his disciples 
were aware of all this, they believed no less 
stoutly that Whitman was an incomparable 
genius. Burroughs wrote on January 4, 1867, 
to O'Connor, after the latter had been reading 
the manuscript of his Notes : — 

" He is, in my opinion, either more & different 
from any other poet, or he is a ridiculous fail- 
ure. I am fully persuaded that he belongs to 
an entirely new class of geniuses which has no 
type in the past ; & that he is to be justified 
and explained on entirely new grounds. You 
can never make people believe till the day you 
die, that Walt is like other poets, & we have 
got to show new ground, new issues, new ends 
in literature by which to try him, or we will be 
forced to admit that he is a tremendous 
humbug. . . . And more than that, I do not 
think that either you or I or both, are the 
guardians of Walt's fame, or that we can make 
or unmake it." 

While Burroughs and O'Connor argued, and 
Whitman read by his new astral lamp or 
tramped the streets with Peter Doyle, some of 
the most subtle of the younger English critics 
were finding in Leaves of Grass a new world of 
poetry. Frederick W. H. Myers, then a fellow of 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 183 

Trinity, read from the book to John Addington 
Symonds, an Oxford man of brilliant mind and 
delicate body, who listened with " thrills to the 
very marrow of his bones." Edward Dowden, 
Tyrrel, and other young Irish scholars were 
reading it in Dublin. William Bell Scott the 
artist, who had received a copy from Thomas 
Dixon "the cork-cutter," Ruskin's friend, intro- 
duced it to the notice of Swinburne and W. M. 
Rossetti. It will be remembered that Emerson 
had sent a copy to Carlyle, ten years before. 
Thoreau had sent one to his friend Cholmonde- 
ley, and a few other copies had found their way 
to England. But here was a band of clever 
university men, scholars and poets of a new 
generation, who became convinced of Walt Whit- 
man's claims to be the representative poet of 
democracy. 

It has sometimes been urged in explanation 
of their enthusiasm, that these Englishmen had 
expected on a priori grounds that the typical 
American poet would wear a flannel shirt and 
tuck his trousers into his boot-tops, and that 
therefore, when Whitman appeared clad in that 
fashion, it was natural to assume that here was 
the long awaited bard of a big country. There 
is a pleasing simplicity about this theory. Cer- 
tain Americans resident in London during the 
seventies still remember their amazement and 



184 WALT WHITMAN 

humiliation when a Rocky Mountain poet, their 
fellow guest at English dinner tables, used to 
call for cigarettes in the middle of dinner and 
put two into his mouth at a time, announcing 
proudly to his host : " That 's the way we do it 
in the States!" Some English and Continental 
admiration of Whitman is no doubt due to the 
discovery in him of a rudeness and indecorum 
which were thought indispensable to the role 
of a singer of democracy. But the letters of the 
more discriminating among Whitman's new 
readers are ample proof that they went below 
the surface of boisterous manner, and appre- 
hended something of the deeper drift of Whit- 
man's meaning. Horace E. Scudder, a Boston 
critic of uncommon poise and sobriety, had sent 
DruTYi-Taps to W. M. Eossetti in 1866 with the 
comment that no one had caught so perfectly as 
Whitman " the most elusive elements of Amer- 
ican civilization."^ In Rossetti's ensuing corre- 
spondence with O'Connor and with Whitman 
himself, as shown in the Hossetti Papers and 
elsewhere, there is evidence of sound appreci- 
ation of Whitman's prescience as to the vast 
changes which democracy was working, in Eng- 
land no less than America. 

With regard to certain aspects of Whitman's 
work Rossetti dissented from the first, yet he 

1 Bossetti Papers, London, 1902. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 185 

threw himself vigorously into the task of making 
the American writer better known. Mr. Conway, 
writing to O'Connor on April 30, 1867, reports 
a consultation of Swinburne, W. M. Kossetti, 
and J. C. Hotten the publisher, at which he 
was present, where all agreed that a complete 
republication of Leaves of Grass, without mod- 
ification of two or three passages, " would bring 
a legal prosecution on any publisher." Mr. Con- 
way adds that " an enthusiastic admirer of Walt, 
John Addington Symonds, is preparing a review 
of him for the Edinburgh^ Many letters deal- 
ing with the question of what should be omitted 
from the proposed volume passed between Lon- 
don and Washington during the next six months. 
Eossetti noted in his diary, September 30, 1867 : 
" My principle of selection would be to miss out 
entirely any poem, though otherwise fine and 
unobjectionable, which contains any of his ex- 
treme crudities of expression in the way of 
indecency ; I would not expurgate such poems, 
but simply exclude them." ^ This was what was 
ultimately done. Whitman's letters, printed by 
Kossetti, show that he was quite willing that 
Rossetti should make whatever verbal changes or 
omissions might be thought needful, so long as it 
was intended to print a volume of Selections only ; 
but that he would not consent to an "expur- 

1 Rossetti Papers. 



186 WALT WHITMAN 

gated edition " of the complete Leaves of Grass. 
It should be remembered in this connection that 
in his fourth edition, which had been printed 
at his own expense in Washington some months 
before, he had tacitly omitted many lines that 
had given offense. In fact, in none of the poems 
written after 1860 was there any ground for cen- 
sorship. 

In the mean time Rossetti published (July 6, 
1867) an appreciative article in the London 
Chronicle^ a short-lived liberal Catholic review. 
O'Connor was writing for Putnam! s Magazine 
an extraordinary story called "The Carpenter," * 
in which Christ appears in the guise of a work- 
ing man who has all the outward and many of 
the inward traits of Whitman. This was the 
first of many attempts that have been made to 
express, through the use of the most sacred fig- 
ure known to humanity, the mysterious potency 
of Whitman's personality over a certain class 
of minds. It is significant that it should have 
been written by one of Whitman's associates, 
who saw him in the unheroic and disillusion- 
ing light of daily contact. " The Carpenter " ap- 
peared in January, 1868, and a month later 
copies of Swinburne's critical study of William 
Blake reached America. In one of the closing 

1 Now reprinted in O'Connor's Three Tales, Boston, Hough- 
ton, Mifflin and Company. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 187 

passages of this book Swinburne pointed out 
for the first time the spiritual kinship of Blake 
and Walt Whitman. Both writers possessed, he 
declared, " a splendor now of stars and now of 
storms ; an expanse and exaltation of wing across 
strange spaces of air and upon shoreless stretches 
of sea ; a resolute and reflective love of liberty. 
. . . Even their shortcomings and errors are 
nearly akin. Their poetry . . . being oceanic 
... is troubled with violent groundswells and 
sudden perils of ebb and reflex, of shoal and 
reef, perplexing to the swimmer or the sailor ; it 
partakes of the powers and the faults of ele- 
mental and eternal things ; it is at times noisy 
and barren and loose, rootless and fruitless and 
informal." * 

Swinburne's book was followed by Kossetti's 
Selections.^ This proved to be an excellently 
chosen volume, containing the prose essay pre- 
faced to the 1855 edition, and one hundred and 
three poems, arranged in groups. The editor's 
Prefatory Notice was straightforward. " In re- 
spect of morals or propriety," he " neither ad- 
mired nor approved the incriminated passages," 
yet he asserted his belief that Whitman's was 
" incomparably the largest performance of our 
period in poetry," and that "his voice will one 

1 A. C. Swinburne, William Blake, London, 1868, p. 300. 

2 Poems of Walt Whitman, London, J. C. Hotten, 1868. 



188 WALT WHITMAN 

day be potential or magisterial wherever the 
English language is spoken." 

The publication of Rossetti's Selections gained 
for Whitman one singular and noble friendship, 
that of Mrs. Anne Gilchrist. Her husband, 
Alexander Gilchrist, a friend of the Rossettis 
and the next-door neighbor of the Carlyles on 
Cheyne Row, had been engaged at the time of 
his death, in 1861, upon a Life of Blake, His 
widow, who was left with four children, resolved 
to complete the book, a task which she accom- 
plished in 1863. She was a woman of personal 
charm, of marked power of character, and had a 
wide acquaintance among artistic and literary 
circles. Madox Brown, one of her Pre-Rapha- 
elite friends, happened to lend her Rossetti's 
volume in June, 1869. Fascinated by what she 
found there, she begged Rossetti for a complete 
copy of Leaves of Grass, He complied, and her 
letters about the book were as he notes in his 
Diary (13 July, 1869) " incredibly enthusiastic." 
On that day, after some hesitation, he copied 
and forwarded to O'Connor certain passages 
from the letters, without mentioning the lady's 
name. Two of the passages should be reprinted 
here: 

23 June. " I shall quite fearlessly accept your 
kind offer of the loan of a complete edition — 
certain that that great and divinely beautiful' 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 189 

nature has not, could not, infuse any poison into 
the wine he has poured out for us. And, as for 
what you specially allude to, who so well able to 
bear it — I will say, to judge wisely of it — as 
one who, having been a happy wife & mother, 
has learned to accept with tenderness, to feel a 
sacredness in all the facts of nature? Perhaps 
Walt Whitman has forgotten — or, thro' some 
theory in his head, has overridden — the truth 
that our instincts are beautiful facts of nature, 
as well as our bodies, & that we have a strong 
instinct of silence about some things." 

11 July. " I think it was very manly and kind 
of you to put the whole of Walt Whitman's poems 
into my hands ; & that I have no other friend 
who w'd have judged them and me so wisely and 
generously. ... In regard to those poems which 
raised so loud an outcry, I will take courage to 
say frankly that I find them also beautiful, & 
that I think even you have misapprehended them. 
Perhaps indeed they were chiefly written for 
wives. I rejoice to have read these poems ; &> if 
I or any true woman feel that, certainly men may 
hold their peace about them. You will under- 
stand that I still think that instinct of silence I 
spoke of a right and beautiful thing ; & that it 
is only lovers & poets (perhaps only lovers & 
this poet) who may say what they will — the 
lover to his own, the poet to all, because all are 



190 WALT WHITMAN 

in a sense his own. Shame is like a very flexible 
veil that takes faithfully the shape of what it 
covers — lovely when it hides a lovely thing, 
ugly when it hides an ugly one. There is not any 
fear that the freedom of such impassioned words 
will destroy the sweet shame, the happy silence, 
that enfold & brood over the secrets of love in a 
woman's heart." 

O'Connor read these letters with jubilation. 
The unknown Englishwoman had written what 
no one but a woman could have written, and what 
no other woman had hitherto had the courage to 
say. Whitman himself was deeply moved. Ros- 
setti felt that certain portions of the letters should 
be printed in America, and they finally appeared, 
after some revision, under the title " A Woman's 
Estimate of Walt Whitman," in the Boston i?ac?- 
ical for May, 1870.^ A prefatory note by Ros- 
setti speaks of the letters as " about the fullest, 
farthest-reaching and most eloquent appreciation 
of Whitman yet put into writing." Ultimately 
the poet learned the authorship of the letters, and 
corresponded with Mrs. Gilchrist. For three 
years, 1876-79, she resided in America, much 
of the time near him, and their intimate friend- 

^ They have since been reprinted in Herbert Gilchrist's Xi/(S 
of Anne Gilchrist, and in In Be Walt Whitman. I have quoted 
from O'Connor's own copy of the letters, which differs in some 
respects from the printed versions. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 191 

ship continued until her death, at the age of 
fifty-four, in 1885. She was his " noblest woman 
friend." Her letters to him have never been 
published. 

While the new and old friends of Whitman 
were thus actively engaged in his behalf, the 
poet himself remained, in the language of Mar- 
jorie Fleming, " more than usual calm." Ter- 
ence Mulvaney, playing the part of the god 
Krishna in the palanquin, was not more imper- 
turbable. Always a notable figure upon the 
street, and naively enjoying that fact, he now 
found himself something of a celebrity. Young 
women rose in the horse-cars to give him a seat, 
though he was not yet fifty. By 1868 his photo- 
graphs were on public sale in Washington, and 
he was autographing them for purchasers. His 
somewhat florid personality repelled a few sen- 
sitive observers, as he was well aware. " Some 
people don't like me," he said to Mrs. O'Connor. 
But he won a curious, good-natured, half hu- 
morous notice from the majority of strollers on 
the Washington avenues. They hailed him as 
" Walt," and were vaguely aware that he was a 
" poet." Yet beneath the surface of these pomps 
and vanities, the real man abode solitary, brood- 
ing, hungering for affection. A few days before 
Rossetti wrote of him as " so aboriginal and 
transcendent a genius," Whitman himself was 



192 WALT WHITMAN 

writing to his mother : " I pass the time very 
quietly — some evenings I spend in my attic — 
I have laid in wood & can have a fire when I 
want it — I wish you was here.^^ He is work- 
ing at leisure, he tells her, on his " little book 
in prose," afterwards published as Democratic 
Vistas. An occasional old acquaintance calls 
upon him, as for instance W. J. Stillman, the 
artist and war correspondent, who writes to 
Kossetti that Whitman is " more well-to-do 
than when I saw him before," and " gray as a 
badger." His annual leave of absence was usu- 
ally spent with his mother in Brooklyn, with 
occasional brief excursions. In the fall of 1868, 
for example, he visited friends at Providence, 
and writes back to Eldridge : " I am profoundly 
impressed with Providence, not only for its 
charming locality and features, but for its proof 
& expression of fine relations, as a city, to aver- 
age human comfort, life, & family & individual 
independence and thrift . After all. New Eng- 
land forever! (with perhaps just one or two 
little reservations.)"^ 

When in Brooklyn upon these furloughs he 
wrote regularly to Peter Doyle. Sometimes he 
sent Doyle a " good long " kiss, " on the paper 
here," like an affectionate child. Often he com- 

^ From one of the letters to Eldridge which Mr. John Bur- 
roughs has placed at iny disposal. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 193 

forted him, when ill or out o£ work, with vig- 
orous admonitions. *' As long as the Almighty 
vouchsafes you health, strength, and a clear con- 
science, let other things do their worst, — and let 
Riker ^ go to hell." These letters, as was natural, 
touched but rarely upon literary matters. Occa- 
sionally there were references to current poli- 
tics. On September 15, 1870, he wrote of the 
Franco-Prussian war and of the Italian struggle : 
" As the case stands, I find myself now far more 
for the French than I ever was for the Prus- 
sians .... Then I propose to take my first 
drink with you when I return, in celebration of 
the pegging out of the Pope and all his gang of 
Cardinals and priests — and entry of Victor 
Emanuel into Rome, and making it the capital 
of the great independent Italian nation." As 
Doyle was a Catholic, it is possible that this 
comprehensive toast was never drunk. 

The following summer was made memorable 
to Whitman by a letter from Tennyson, the first 
of a correspondence that continued, at intervals, 
throughout their lives. In thanking Whitman 
for a gift of some of his books, Tennyson wrote 
(July 12, 1871): "I had previously met with 
several of your works and read them with in- 
terest and had made up my mind that you had 
a large and lovable nature. ... I trust that if 

1 Doyle's chief. 



194 WALT WHITMAN 

you visit England you will grant me the pleasure 
of receiving and entertaining you under my own 
roof." ^ Swinburne's Songs before Sunrise^ ap- 
pearing in the same year, contained the fervent 
poem " To Walt Whitman in America." For the 
opening of the annual exhibition of the Amer- 
ican Institute in New York on September 7 
Whitman wrote his Song of the Exposition^ 
containing the wonderfully effective description 
of the passing of the feudal world : 

" Blazon'd with Shakespere's purple page, 
And dirged by Tennyson's sweet sad rhyme." 

Whitman's literary activity during this year 
was notable. He issued, still at his own expense, 
a fifth edition of Leaves of Grass. The general 
arrangement of the poems, as grouped in the 
1867 edition, was retained, with but a few 
changes. A group of twenty-three new poems, 
with some others that had been printed previ- 
ously, was also issued in this year in pamphlet 
form, under the title Passage to India^ and in 
some copies of the 1871 edition of Leaves of 
Grass this pamphlet is included. Its title- 
poem, " Passage to India," is typical of the 
mystical, far-ranging reveries with which Whit- 
man's later poetry is increasingly filled. The 

1 T. Donaldson's Walt Whitman, the Man, p. 224. 
^ Roberts Brothers of Boston published this poem in pam- 
phlet form, 1871, under the title : AJler All, Not to Create Only. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 195 

completion of the Suez Canal and of the Pacific 
Railroad, making tangible the old dreams of a 
passage to the Orient, are used as symbols not 
only of the growing unity of the world, but of 
the voyages of the soul in search of God. 
Speaking of " Passage to India " toward the 
close of his life, he said : " There 's more of me, 
the essential, ultimate me, in that than in any 
of the poems. . . The burden of it is evolution — 
the one thing escaping the other — the unfolding 
of cosmic purposes." 

Dated in 1871, likewise, although completed 
in 1870, was the prose essay. Democratic Vistas, 
This treatise, composed at intervals during 
several years, was a reexamination of the theme 
of the famous preface of 1855, namely the 
function of literature in democratic America. 
Whitman's mind was not fashioned for sus- 
tained, close reasoning in prose. But here was a 
subject upon which he had brooded long and 
deeply; and though the coils of his thought 
return again and again upon themselves, 
making his essay difficult to those who read 
it for the first time, it remains, in spite of its 
defects in formal structure, one of the most 
suggestive and significant contributions to Amer- 
ican literature. Beginning with a confession 
of the appalling dangers of universal suffrage, 
he asserts that the real problems of humanity 



196 WALT WHITMAN 

are not political, merely, but social and reli- 
gious. It is these questions that must be con- 
fronted by literature. While democracy has 
brought about a superficial popular intellect- 
uality, it has failed, thus far, in ministering to 
the deeper wants of the soul. But a great 
religious civilization is the only justification of 
a great material one. Literature has never ade- 
quately recognized the people, in their truest 
self. It must do so. It must teach both individ- 
ualism and fraternalism, and both of these doc- 
trines must be vitalized by religion. The great 
literatures, artists and teachers of the past pre- 
serve, indeed, all the best experience of human- 
ity hitherto. 

Whitman sketches these figures of the past 
in firm pictorial prose : " For us those bea- 
cons burn through all the nights. Unknown 
Egyptians, graving hieroglyphs ; Hindus, with 
hymn and apothegm and endless epic ; Hebrew 
prophet, with spirituality, as in flashes of 
lightning, conscience like red-hot iron, plaintive 
songs and screams of vengeance for tyrannies 
and enslavement ; Christ, with bent head, 
brooding love and peace, like a dove ; Greek, 
creating eternal shapes of physical and esthetic 
proportion ; Roman, lord of satire, the sword, 
and the codex ; — of the figures, some far off 
and veil'd, others nearer and visible; Dante, 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 197 

stalking with lean form, nothing but fibre, not 
a grain of superfluous flesh; Angelo and the 
great painters, architects, musicians ; rich Shake- 
spere, luxuriant as the sun, artist and singer of 
feudalism in its sunset, with all the gorgeous 
colors, owner thereof and using them at will ; 
and so to such as German Kant and Hegel, 
where they, though near us, leaping over the 
ages, sit again, impassive, imperturbable, like 
the Egyptian gods." Nevertheless, to supplement 
all these, America, too, needs her poets and 
seers, to interpret, consistently with modern 
science, the profounder meanings of the present 
day. Such, in barest outline, is the argument 
of Democratic Vistas, 

New evidences of foreign recognition now came 
thick and fast. Edward Dowden published in 
the Westminster Meview for July, 1871, a 
notable article on Whitman under the title 
"The Poetry of Democracy." He sent it to 
Washington, with a friendly letter which led the 
way to a frequent and intimate correspondence. 
Some of the foremost critics upon the Continent 
perceived that a new force had arisen in modern 
literature. Ferdinand Freiligrath, in an enthu- 
siastic article, accompanied by translations from 
Leaves of Grass, published in the Augsburg 
Allgemeine Zeitung May 10, 1868, had already 
hailed Whitman's verse as the poetry of the 



198 WALT WHITMAN 

future.* He wrote glowing letters both to Whit- 
man and to O'Connor. Rudolph Schmidt, the 
Scandinavian critic, translated Democratic Vis* 
tas into Danish, and wrote upon Whitman in 
Febuary, 1872, for a Copenhagen journal. In a 
letter addressed to Whitman in April, Schmidt 
quotes Bjornson as saying, "Walt Whitman 
makes me a joy as no new man in many years, 
and in one respect the greatest I ever had." ^ 
On June 1, 1872, Th. Bentzon (Madame Blanc) 
published an article on the new American poet 
in the Hevue des Deux Mondes. It seemed as 
if the tide had really turned at last. Something 
of the spirit of this happy year appears in 
Whitman's first letter to Edward Dowden, who 
kindly allows me to reprint it. 

Washington, Jan. 18, 1872. 

Dear Mr. Dowden, — 

1 must no longer delay writing, & to acknow- 
ledge your letters of Sept 5 and Oct 15 last. I 
had previously (Aug 22) written you very briefly 
in response to your friendly letter of July 23d, 
the first you wrote me, accompanying copy of the 
Review.^ All — letters & Review — have been 

^ " Stehen wir vor einer Zukunf tspoesie wie uns schon seit 
Jahren eine Zukunf tsmusik vorkiindigt wird ? Und ist Walt 
Whitman mehr als Richard Wagner ? " 

2 With IValt Whitman in Camden, p. 274. 
8 The Westminster Review for Jiily, 1871. 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 199 

read & re-read. I am sure I appreciate you in 
them. May I say you do not seem to stand afar 
off, but very near to me. What John Burroughs 
brings adds confirmation. I was deeply inter- 
ested in the accounts given in the letters of your 
friends. I do not hesitate to call them mine too. 
. . . Affectionate remembrance to all of them. 
You especially, and Mrs. Dowden, & indeed all 
of you, already, I say, stand near to me. I wish 
each to be told my remembrance (or to see this 
letter if convenient). 

I like well the positions & ideas in your West- 
minster article — and radiating from the central 
point of assumption of my pieces being, or com- 
mencing " the poetry of Democracy. " It presents 
all the considerations which such a critical text 
& starting point require, in a full, eloquent, & 
convincing manner. I entirely accept it, all & 
several & am not unaware that it probably 
afforded, if not the only, at least the most 
likely gate, by which you as an earnest friend 
of my book, & believing critic of it, would 
gain entrance to a leading review. — Besides, 
I think the main theme you exploit is really 
of the first importance — and all the rest can 
be broached & led to, through it, as well as any 
other way. 

I would say that (as you of course see) the 
spine or verterber [sic] principle of my book is 



200 WALT WHITMAN 

a model or ideal (for the service of the New 
World, & to be gradually absorbed in it) of 
a complete healthy, heroic, practical modern 
Man — emotional, moral, spiritual, patriotic — 
a grander better son, brother, husband, father, 
friend, citizen than any yet — formed & shaped 
in consonance with modern science, with Amer- 
ican Democracy, & with the requirements of cur- 
rent industrial & professional life — model of a 
Woman also, equally modern & heroic — a bet- 
ter daughter, wife, mother, citizen also, than 
any yet. I seek to typify a living Human Per- 
sonality, immensely animal, with immense pas- 
sions, immense amativeness, immense adhesive- 
ness — in the woman immense maternity — & 
then, in both, immenser far a moral conscience, 
& in always realizing the direct & indirect con- 
trol of the divine laws through all and over all 
forever. 

In " Democratic Yistas " I seek to make pa- 
tent the appalling vacuum, in our times & here, 
of any school of great imaginative Literature & 
Art, fit for a Republican, Religious, & Healthy 
people — and to suggest and prophesy such a 
Literature as the only vital means of sustaining 
& perpetuating such a people. I would project 
at least the rough sketch of such a school of 
Literatures — an entirely new breed of authors, 
poets, American, comprehensive, Hegelian, Demo- 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 201 

cratic, religious — & with an infinitely larger 
scope & method than any yet [\<^ord omitted] 

There is one point touched by you in the West- 
minster criticism that if occasion again arises, 
might be dwelt on more fully — that is the atti- 
tude of sneering denial which magazines, editors, 
publishers, " critics " &o in the U. S. hold toward 
" Leaves of Grass." As to " Democratic Vistas " 
it remains entirely unread, uncalled for here in 
America. If you write again for publication 
about my books, or have opportunity to influence 
any forthcoming article on them, I think it would 
be a proper & even essential part of such article 
to include the fact that the books are hardly 
recognized at all by the orthodox literary & con- 
vential [sic] authorities of the U. S. — that the 
opposition is bitter, & in a large majority, & that 
the author was actually turned out of a small 
government employment & deprived of his means 
of support by a Head of Department at Wash- 
ington solely on account of having written his 
poems. 

True I take the whole matter coolly. I know 
my book has been composed in a cheerful & con- 
tented spirit — & that the same still substantially 
remains with me (And I want my friends, in- 
deed, when writing for publication about my 
poetry, to present its gay-heartedness as one of 
its chief qualities.) 



202 WALT WHITMAN 

I am in excellent health, & again & still work 
as clerk here in Washington. 

I saw John Burroughs very lately. He is well. 
He showed me a letter he had just rec'd from 
you. 

I wish more & more (and especially now that 
I realize I know you, & we should be no stran- 
gers) to journey over sea, & visit England & your 
country. 

Tennyson has written to me twice — & very 
cordial & hearty letters. He invites me to be- 
come his guest. 

I have rec'd a letter from Joaquin Miller. He 
was at last accounts in Oregon, recuperating, 
studying, enjoying grand & fresh Nature, & 
writing something new. 

Emerson has just been this way (Baltimore & 
Washington) lecturing. He maintains the same 
attitude — draws on the same themes — as twenty- 
five years ago. It all seems to me quite attenu- 
ated (the first drawing of a good pot of tea, you 
know, and Emerson's was the heavenly herb it- 
self — but what must one say to a second, and 
even third or fourth infusion ?) I send you a 
newspaper report of his lecture here a night or 
two ago. It is a fair sample. 

And now my dear friend, I must close. I have 
long wished to write you a letter to show, if no- 
thing more, that I heartily realize your kindness 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 203 

& sympatliy, & would draw the communion closer 
between us. I shall probably send you anything 
I publish, and anything about my affairs or self 
that might interest you. You too must write 
freely to me — & 1 hope frequently 
Direct Walt Whitman 

Solicitor's Office Treasury 
Washington D. C. 

U. S. America. 

In June, 1872, Whitman journeyed to Hano- 
ver, New Hampshire, to deliver the Commence- 
ment Poem at Dartmouth College. The story 
of his invitation, now told for the first time, is 
curious. I am indebted for it to Professor 
Charles F. Kichardson of Dartmouth, who ascer- 
tained the facts from the surviving ringleaders of 
what was originally intended as a joke upon the 
Faculty. He writes as follows : — 

" It appears that his selection came, at least in 
some degree, because of a class feud and the desire 
on the part of certain members of the class to 
annoy the faculty by the appearance of a bard 
objectionable to some. The ' United Literary So- 
cieties ' (United Fraternity and Social Friends) 
were then in their decadence, and the choice 
of orators and poets fell to Senior classes, the 
members of which were assigned to this or 
that society alphabetically. Often the Seniors did 



1 
I 



204 WALT WHITMAN 

not know the society to which they belonged, 
until there came up some matter of electing 
undergraduate librarians or Commencement- 
week celebrities to give addresses. In 1872 there 
was in the Senior class a semi-jocose organiz- 
ation called ' Captain Cotton's Cadets ' — not 
strictly a wild set, but not precisely the leaders 
of evangelical activities in the college. These 
* Cadets ' ran the Senior elections of that year, 
and incidentally got Whitman to come. And 
yet, as in Emerson's case in 1838, by luck or 
malice the then conservative college gave an early 
hearing to an * advanced ' man. 

" Whitman came in his usual familiar garb. 
His delivery of his poem is said by those who 
remember it to have been monotonous and with- 
out animation, and his voice failed to fill the 
back part of the church. When he stepped back 
to his seat there was some doubt whether he had 
finished, so that the audience was relieved when 
the chairman rose and shook hands with him. 
The poem itself was received without interest 
and without aversion. In the evening Whitman, 
who impressed his beholders as much older than 
fifty-three, attended the ' Commencement Con- 
cert,' and when others applauded the singers 
expressed his own approval by waving his arm 
and shouting ' bravo.' If the students' aim had 
been to plague the timid faculty, then composed 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 205 

of strictly ' orthodox ' Congregationalists, they 
were unsuccessful, for the good gray poet was 
entertained at the house of the gentle wife of 
Dr. S. P. Leeds, the college pastor, who was 
then in Europe. On his departure he gave 
Mrs. Leeds (who did not find him trouble- 
somely peculiar in any way) a copy of * As a 
Strong Bird on Pinions Free,' — and so Dart- 
mouth gave its early welcome to the American 
Homer." 

To make this tale of the irony of literary fame 
complete, I venture to quote from an unpub- 
lished manuscript article by " the American 
Homer " himself, commenting upon the favorable 
attention excited by his poem.^ 

^ I am indebted for the use of this manuscript (a portion 
of which is given in facsimile opposite page 206) to John 
Boyd Thacher, Esq., of Albany. Whitman's poem was de- 
livered on June 26. At the head of the MS. is written in blue 
pencil, in Whitman's hand: "Use this if convenient either 
Friday, June 28th or Saturday June 29th — (lead, as edi- 
torial, and put on 3rd or 4th column of 2d page) follow 
on copy and read proof carefully by copy." The MS. is writ- 
ten on the back of sheets of Department of Justice stationery. 
As the Dartmouth poem was already in type at the time of its 
delivery, it is probable that Whitman wrote the above review 
before leaving for Hanover. He wrote to Doyle from Han- 
over on June 27 : " Pete, did my poem appear in the 
Washington papers — I suppose Thursday or Friday — Chroni- 
cle or Patriot ? If so send me one — (or one of each)." — 
Nothing seems to have appeared, however, in the Chronicle 
or Patriot. 



206 WALT WHITMAN 

"WALT WHITMAN 

" The late Dartmouth College utterance of the 
above-named celebrity is again arousing atten- 
tion to his theory of the poet's art, and its ex- 
emplification in his writings. An intellectual 
career, steadily pressing its way amid strong 
impediments, through the past sixteen or seven- 
teen years, and evidencing itself during that time 
in the good-sized volume of poems, * Leaves of 
Grass,^ and the small prose book, ^Democratic 
Vistas,^ shows no sign of flagging energy in its 
late effusions, the American Institute poem, the 
cheering apostrophe to France, or in this College 
Commencement piece, ' As a strong Bird, on 
Pinions free,' which, with some others, forms 
the first installment of a new volume just pub- 
lished. In the preface to it, the author says that 
as he intended his ' Leaves ' to be the songs of 
a great composite Democratic individual he has 
in mind to chant, in the new volume, of which 
he gives the first installment, a great composite 
Democratic nationality. 

" Walt Whitman's form of composition is not 
attractive at first sight to accustomed readers of 
verse. He discharges himself quite altogether 
from the old laws of ' poetry,' considering them 
and their results unfit for present needs, and espe- 
cially unfit for the United States, and claims to in- 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 207 

augurate an original modern style, to be followed 
& expanded by future writers. His theory is 
that our times exhibit the advent of two espe- 
cially new creative worlds, or influences, giving a 
radically changed form to Civilization, namely, 
the world of science for one, and the world of 
democratic republicanism for another, and that 
a third influence, a new poetic world of charac- 
ter and form, adjusted to the new spirit and 
facts and consistent with democracy and science, is 
indispensable. He says the United States must 
found their own imaginative literature & po- 
etry, & that nothiug merely copied from & 
following out the feudal world will do. His 
aim is therefore a profound one & essentially 
revolutionary. He dismisses without ceremony 
all the orthodox accoutrements, tropes, verbal 
haberdashery, 'feet,' and the entire stock in 
trade of rhyme-talking heroes and heroines and 
all the love-sick plots of customary poetry, and 
constructs his verse in a loose and free metre of 
his own, of an irregular length of lines, appar- 
ently lawless at first perusal, although on closer 
examination a certain regularity appears, like 
the recurrence of lesser and larger waves on the 
sea-shore, rolling in without intermission, and 
fitfully rising and falling. 

"In this free metre, and in verses — when 
you get the hang of them — singularly exhilarat- 



208 WALT WHITMAN 

ing, and that affect one like an atmosphere 
unusually charged with oxygen, he, by a perpet- 
ual series of what might be called ejaculations^ 
manages to express himself on about every theme 
interesting to humanity, or known to the body, 
passions, experiences, emotions of man or 
woman, or sought by the intellect and soul, with 
illustrations drawn largely from our own times 
and country, & somewhat from every age and 
country. 

" Undoubtedly with his new volume, including 
the College poem, ' As a Strong Bird,' the re- 
putation of this author, though still disputed, is 
to mount beyond anything previously, and his 
claims are to pique the public ear more than 
ever. Expectation is even now more and more 
stimulated, and already, by a few of the boldest 
prophets, some very audacious speculations are 
launched forth. Time only can show if there is 
indeed anything in them. This Walt Whitman 
— this queer one whom most of us have watched, 
with more or less amusement, walking by — this 
goer and comer, for years, about New York and 
Washington — good natured with everybody, 
like some farmer, or mate of some coasting vessel, 
familiarly accosted by all, hardly any one of us 
stopping to Mr. him — this man of many charac- 
ters, among the rest that of volunteer help in the 
army hospitals and on the field during the whole 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 209 

of the late war, carefully tending all the wounded 
he could, southern or northern — if it should 
turn out that in this plain unsuspected old cus- 
tomer, dressed in gray & wearing no neck tie, 
America and her republican institutions are 
possessing that rara avis a real national poet, 
chanting, putting in form, in her own proud 
spirit, in first class style, for present & future 
time, her democratic shapes even as the bards 
of Judah put in song, for all time to come, the 
Hebrew spirit, and Homer the war-life of pre- 
historic Greece, and Shakespeare the feudal 
shapes of Europe's kings and lords ! 

" Whether or not the future will justify such 
extravagant claims of his admirers, only that 
future itself can show. But Walt Whitman is 
certainly taking position as an original force 
and new power in literature. He has excited an 
enthusiasm among the republicans and young 
poets of Europe unequalled by our oldest and 
best known names. The literary opposition to 
him in the United States has, it is true, been 
authoritative, and continues to be so. But the 
man has outlived the stress of misrepresentation, 
burlesque, evil prophecy, and all calumnies & 
imputations, and may now answer, as Captain 
Paul Jones did, when, after the onslaught of the 
Serapis, he was asked if he had struck his colors 
— ' Struck ? ' answered the Captain quietly, 



210 WALT WHITMAN 

' Not at all — I have only just begun my part 
of the fighting.' " 

The humor, the follies, and the pathos of 
the struggle for literary reputation have rarely 
been written more clearly than in this record of 
Whitman's visit to Dartmouth College. 

Leaving Hanover, Whitman returned by way 
of Burlington, Vermont, where his married 
sister, Hannah, was living. By the first of July 
he was back in Washington. In September 
his mother, now seventy-five and very feeble, 
moved to Camden, New Jersey, to live with her 
son George, who was prospering in business. 
But her sojourn was to be but brief; and 
Walt's ten years of life in Washington were 
almost over. 

As the winter drew on, he complained occa- 
sionally of those "spells in the head" which 
had troubled him at intervals since his break- 
down in 1864. On the 23d of January, 1873, 
he sat late by his astral lamp in the Treasury 
Building, reading a Bulwer-Lytton novel. As 
lie left, the guard thought that he looked ill. 
Between three and four in the morning, in his 
solitary lodging, he woke to find himself par- 
tially paralyzed. For a few days his friends 
feared the worst. Doyle, Mrs. O'Connor, El- 
dridge, and the rest, were constant in their at- 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 211 

tentions. Then he began to rally, and by the last 
of March he was crawling back to his desk for 
a little work each day. But trouble upon trouble 
came. " Jeff's " wife, Martha, a special favorite, 
died in St. Louis. The old mother in Camden 
fell ill, and Walt was sorely anxious. On May 
10 he made his own will.^ Ten days later, 
feeble as he was, he made the journey to Cam- 
den, and he was there, in his brother's little 
house at 322 Stevens Street, when their 
mother passed away. She died on May 23. 

" I cannot be reconciled yet," he wrote Peter 
Doyle in August ; " it is the great cloud of my 
life." Between Whitman and the large, simple 
nature of his mother there had been bonds of 
deepest instinctive sympathy. Her death left 
him pathetically lonely. His brother George 
was kind, but of a wholly different fibre : caring, 
as Walt once said, "more for pipes than for 
poems." He offered Walt house-room at Cam- 
den, and in the poet's illness and sorrow a 
return to Washington seemed, for the present at 
least, impossible. 

It turned out that he never went back. He 
was now fifty-four, and he had nearly a score of 
years still before him. But his departure from 
Washington in 1873 marked the end of an 
epoch. Though he was still to write a few 

^ A f acsinaile is given opposite page 302, 



212 WALT WHITMAN 

poems and many of the best pages of his prose, 
the work to which he owes his fame was done. 
He was to make new friends, and to become 
increasingly the picturesque object of literary 
pilgrimages. But the pleasant fellowships of the 
Washington period were past. The circle broke 
up. Peter Doyle went to work for the Pennsyl- 
vania Railroad. John Burroughs bought a farm 
on the Hudson. The loyal William O'Connor 
had become estranged, the original cause being, 
it is said, a trivial though violent difference of 
opinion over the merits of Sumner's recon- 
struction legislation, which Walt had attacked 
and O'Connor defended till both men lost their 
tempers. Ultimately they were reconciled, but 
the estrangement was doubly painful to men 
of such an emotional type, and such capacity 
for affection. 

In one respect only does Whitman, during 
these ten years and later, seem to have failed in 
the finer obligations of friendship. He accepted 
the worship of those younger men, who gave 
freely of their time, their literary zeal, their 
scanty money, in championing his cause. He 
allowed them to think that in certain aspects of 
his past experience — challenged by the enemy, 
and passionately defended by them — his life 
was known to them. And it was not. Loqua- 
cious as was Leaves of Grass in the mystical 



THE CLERK AND HIS FRIENDS 213 

frenzies of its confessionals, the actual Walt 
Whitman of Brooklyn and Washington was 
shrewdly reticent. If he chose — as in this 
instance he did choose — concealment, 

" the secrets of nature 
Have not more gifts in taciturnity." 



CHAPTER VI 

THE CAMDEN BAKD 

Alas I how full of fear 

Is the fate of Prophet and Seer ! 

Forevennore, forevermore, 

It shall be as it hath been heretofore ; 

The age in -which they live 

Will not forgive 

The splendor of the everlasting light 

That makes their foreheads bright, 

Nor the sublime 

Fore-running of their time ! 

Longfellow, Christus : A Mystery. 

Camden, New Jersey, Whitman's home dur- 
ing the last nineteen years of his life, is to the 
city of Philadelphia, which is separated from it 
by the Delaware River, what Hoboken is to New 
York, and Chelsea to Boston. The New York 
Sun once described it as the refuge of those 
who were in doubt, debt, or despair. Yet it was 
now to have its vates sacer, with the band of 
disciples, the travel-stained pilgrims, and ulti- 
mately the famous tomb. A lucky town, there- 
fore, however commonplace. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 215 

For some months after his mother's death, 
Whitman occupied her room in his brother's 
house at 322 Stevens Street. He secured a sub- 
stitute, Walter Godey, to perform his duties at 
Washington. The Treasury authorities were con- 
siderate, and allowed this arrangement to con- 
tinue for more than a year, when, as Whitman 
did not return, his clerkship was given to another 
man. In the mean time his life settled into the 
routine of semi-invalidism. He paid for his 
board, his savings being sufficient for his im- 
mediate maintenance. In September, 1873, the 
Whitmans moved to a new corner house, 431 
Stevens Street. Walt, with his old habit, chose 
a room on the top floor. On pleasant days he 
would hobble with his cane to the ferry and 
cross the Delaware to Philadelphia, where the 
drivers of the Market Street horsecars, who 
knew him as "the Camden poet," used to let him 
sit on their chairs upon the front platform for 
long rides. He wrote occasionally to Eldridge 
and to Peter Doyle, sending to the latter Scot- 
tish Chiefs and other books, together with curi- 
ously explicit advice about the style of his 
clothes. 

As he gradually recovered strength, he be- 
gan to compose verse again. "The Prayer of 
Columbus," in which the author is disguised as 
the great Genoese, appeared in Harper* s for 



216 WALT WHITMAN 

March, 1874. " The Song of the Universal," 
read by proxy at the Commencement of Tufts 
College, Massachusetts, in 1874, and "The 
Song of the Redwood Tree," date from this same 
period ; and all three poems are notable for their 
nobility of feeling and their comparative freedom 
from extravagance and eccentricity of form. 
Indeed, in the regularity of their rhythmical 
design, and their skillful use of the repetend and 
other technical devices, they are dangerously 
near the confines of that *' conventional " poetry 
which Whitman affected to despise. 

He was not wholly happy under his brother's 
roof, and formed various plans for building a 
cottage on a cheap lot which he had bought, thus 
" laying up here in Camden," like a sailor home 
from voyaging. But his little hoard of ready 
money was growing steadily less. He was unable 
to do any consecutive work, though he sometimes 
amused himself by setting up SoJie of his poems 
in a Camden printing-office. Throughout 1875 
be was in low spirits, — lonely, with penury near 
at hand. In the following spring, Mr. Robert 
Buchanan, the English poet and writer, who had 
already involved himself in controversy with 
Dante Rossetti and Swinburne, published in the 
London News a letter setting forth the Amer- 
ican neglect of Whitman in his illness and 
poverty. W. M. Rossetti wrote to Whitman at 



THE CAMDEN BARD 217 

once for information, and the latter replied^ with 
much simplicity and self-respect that he was not 
actually in want, but that he would gratefully 
accept any effort which his English friends might 
make to further the sale of his books, — which 
were still, it must be remembered, sold only by 
himself. The current edition was the sixth, — 
the so-called Centennial edition of 1876, — con- 
sisting of two volumes, one made up of Leaves of 
Grass, and the other, entitled Two Itivulets^ 
containing a few new poems, besides " Demo- 
cratic Vistas " and other prose pieces. 

The result of this correspondence was most 
gratifying. " Those blessed gales from the Brit- 
ish Isles probably (certainly) saved me," wrote 
Whitman afterward. The price of the books was 
ten dollars a set, but many Englishmen followed 
the example of Tennyson and Ruskin in paying 
double or treble prices, and " both the cash and 
the emotional oheer were deep medicines." In 
the long lists of subscribers ^ appear such well- 
known names as W. M. and Dante Rossetti, 
Lord Houghton, Edward Dowden, Mrs. Gil- 
christ, Edward Carpenter, Alfred Tennyson, 

1 This letter is printed on p. 310 of the Prose Works. 

2 In a letter to Edward Dowden, May 2, 1875, Whitman ex- 
plained that this title symbolized " two flowing chains of prose 
& verse, emanating- the real & ideal." 

3 See page 519 of Frose Works. 



218 WALT WHITMAN 

John Ruskin, W. B. Scott, Edmund Gosse, 
George Saintsbury, G. H. Lewes, G. H. Bough- 
ton, Alexander Ireland, M. D. Conway, Rev. T. 
E. Brown, P. B. Marston, J. H. McCarthy, A. 
B. Grosart, Hubert Herkomer, R. L. Nettleship, 
W. J. Stillman, and F. Madox Brown. No 
wonder the broken-down poet in Camden, ridi- 
culed or ignored by most of his countrymen, 
again took heart. From a letter to Edward Dow- 
den, dated March 4, 1876, a grateful passage may 
be given here as typical of Whitman's feelings. 
" To-day comes your affectionate hearty valued 
letter of Feb. 16, all right with enclosure — draft 
12X 10s, all deeply appreciated — the letter good, 
cannot be better, but, as always, the spirit the 
main thing — (altogether like some fresh, mag- 
netic, friendly breath of breeze 'way off there 
from the Irish coast) — I wonder if you can 
know how much good such things do me." 

That there was some resentment in this coun- 
try at the tone of Mr. Buchanan's letter is evi- 
denced by a courteous rejoinder to it by George 
William Curtis. He pointed out in the " Easy 
Chair " of Harper'' s Monthly for June, 1876, 
that " Mr. Whitman has had the same opportun- 
ity that Mr. Bryant and Mr. Longfellow have 
had. His works have been very widely read and 
criticised. He has found a place in several of 
the chief magazines. He has had an enthusiastic 



THE CAMDEN BARD 219 

and devoted body of admirers, who have extolled 
him as immeasurably superior to all other 
American authors. He has been in no sense 
neglected or obscure, but an unusual public 
curiosity has always attended him. . . . There 
is no conspiracy against Mr. Whitman, nor any 
jealousy of him among the acknowledged chiefs 
of American literature, and were he or his friends 
to authorize an appeal like that made by Mr. 
Buchanan, there would be a response, we are 
very sure, which would dispose of that gentle- 
man's assertions and innuendoes." 

Whitman himself maintained a dignified si- 
lence. With an instinct deeper than any reasoning, 
he turned to Nature, the waiting mother. Ten 
or a dozen miles from Camden he found a se- 
cluded spot on Timber Creek, near a farmhouse 
kept by friendly people named Stafford. Mak- 
ing his home with them from early spring to 
autumn, he spent for two or three years most of 
his time out of doors, along the banks of Tim- 
ber Creek.i At first he asked but little : " The 
trick is, I find, to tone your wants and tastes 
low down enough, and make much of negatives, 
and of mere daylight and the skies." But soon 
he found more positive comfort. " After you 
have exhausted what there is in business, poli- 

1 For pictures of this delightful spot, see the illustrations 
in H. B, Binns's Walt Whitman. 



220 WALT WHITMAN 

tics, conviviality, love, and so on — have found 
that none of these finally satisfy, or perma- 
ently wear — what remains ? Nature remains ; 
to bring out from their torpid recesses, the affini- 
ties of a man or woman with the open air, the 
trees, fields, the changes of seasons — the sun 
by day and the stars of heaven by night. . . . 
Dear, soothing, healthy, restoration-hours ! " 

Bathing solitary in the spring that brimmed an 
abandoned marl-pit, wrestling, as his strength 
returned, with the tough saplings, sitting motion- 
less, hour after hour, to watch the dragon-flies 
and kingfishers, he grew slowly into his old habit 
of happiness again. The illness seemed to leave 
him with even finer senses than before and with 
a new power of close observation of the ways of 
nature. His ear and eyesight had always been 
acute, but he had hitherto been a roamer through 
the out-door world rather than a watcher of it. 
Now no sound or color or perfume seemed to 
escape him ; he listened to the migrating birds at 
midnight, the bumble-bees in the grass, the low 
wind in the tree-tops. He watched fugitive shad- 
ows on the grass and the hawk circling in the 
sky, and he was content at heart. He learned 
the lesson of the trees. He made lists, quite like 
those now recommended to twentieth century 
school-children, of the flowers and birds which he 
came to know at sight. He wrote about all these 



THE CAMDEN BARD 221 

things in his diary, published later under the title 
Specimen Days^ and neither Thoreau, Richard 
Jefferies, nor John Burroughs has commanded 
at will for such a purpose a more simple and 
charming prose. 

But the increasing disposition of his mind, as 
his purely creative impulse began to slacken, was 
to search back of the outward facts of Nature, 
for her spirit and purpose. " I, too, like the rest, 
feel the modern tendencies (from all the prevail- 
ing intellections, literature and poems) to turn 
everything to pathos, ennui, morbidity, dissatis- 
faction, death. Yet how clear it is to me that 
those are not the results, influences of Nature 
at all, but of one's own distorted, sick or silly 
soul. Here, amid this wild, free scene, how heal- 
thy, how joyous, how clean and vigorous and 
sweet ! " Often in the lane or by the stream at 
night, he watched the stars, with brooding 
thoughts that recall the meditations of dreamers 
like Amiel and Senancour : " As if for the first 
time, indeed, creation noiselessly sank into and 
through me its placid and untellable lesson, be- 
yond — O, so infinitely beyond ! — anything 
from art, books, sermons or from science, old 
or new. The spirit's hour — religion's hour — 
the visible suggestion of God in space or time 
— now once definitely indicated, if never again. 
The untold pointed at — the heavens all paved 



222 WALT WHITMAN 

with it. The Milky Way, as if some super- 
human symphony, some ode of universal vague- 
ness disdaining syllable and sound — a flashing 
.glance of Deity, address'd to the soul. All silent- 
ly — the indescribable night and stars — far off 
and silently." ^ 

Such lonely raptures are characteristic of the 
Timber Creek period of Whitman's convales- 
cence. But many new friendships date from these 
years. In 1876 Mrs. Gilchrist settled in Phil- 
adelphia, with her children, for a long sojourn, and 
Whitman became a frequent guest at her house. 
In January, 1877, he spoke briefly at the 140th 
anniversary of the birthday of Thomas Paine. 
The next month he visited Mr. and Mrs. J. H. 
Johnston, new and warm friends in New York, and 
much enjoyed a reception in his honor. In May, 
Edward Carpenter, an attractive young English- 
man, f uU of zeal for the Whitman gospel, which 
he has since expounded in many books of prose 
and Whitmanian verse, came to visit the poet in 
Camden. Shortly afterward came Dr. R. M. 
Bucke, a Canadian physician in charge of the in- 
sane asylum at London, Ontario. He was then 
forty, a man of force and character, and of good 
professional standing. As his Cosmic Con- 
sciousness afterwards showed, he was himself a 
mystic of a pronounced type, and had once, while 

1 Prose Works J p, 112. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 223 

driving home at midnight in a hansom cab, been 
wrapped in a flame-colored cloud and illuminated 
by a consciousness of the possession of eternal life, 
and of the immortality of all men.^ For nine 
years previous to 1877, he had been reading 
Walt Whitman, although at first with anger and 
bewilderment. Now he sought him out in Cam- 
den, finding in the local directory the address : 
" Whitman, Walt, Poet, 431 Stevens Street." 
Dr. Bucke relates that he was " almost amazed 
by the beauty and majesty of his person and the 
gracious air of purity that surrounded and per- 
meated him." ^ The interview was but brief, 
and Whitman said nothing that Bucke remem- 
bered, but " a sort of spiritual intoxication set 
in. . . . It seemed to me at that time certain that 
he was either actually a god or in some sense 
clearly and entirely preterhuman. Be all this as 
it may, it is certain that the hour spent that day 
with the poet was the turning point of my life." 
Tor the next fifteen years Dr. Bucke was un- 
wearied in the offices of friendship, publishing in 
1883 a valuable biography of Whitman, and be- 
coming ultimately one of his literary executors. 
John Burroughs was now settled happily 

1 See the quotation from Bucke in William James's Varie- 
ties of Religious Experience, p. 398. 

2 Walt Whitman Fellowship Papers, vi, Philadelphia, Sep- 
tember, 1894. 



224 WALT WHITMAN 

upon his farm on the Hudson, and here Whit- 
man visited him in 1878 and again in the fol- 
lowing year. On April 14, 1879, he was strong 
enough to deliver in New York a memorial 
address on Lincoln, which was repeated in sub- 
sequent years in Philadelphia and in Boston, 
and which he was anxious to give annually 
so long as his strength should permit. These 
lectures were attended by the curious as well 
as by the loyal, and they received a measure 
of newspaper publicity. In September, 1879, 
Whitman ^made the second long journey of his 
life, traveling with friends as far west as the 
Rocky Mountains, and returning to Camden in 
January, after a stay in St. Louis with his 
brother "Jeff." The story of his travels is 
written in Specimen Days, and in a few pictur- 
esque poems like " Italian Music in Dakota " 
and " Spirits that formed this Scene." There 
was something in the chasms and gorges and 
fantastic forms of the Rockies that made him 
exclaim over and over again : " I have found 
the law of my own poems ! " He felt anew that 
the boundless prodigality of the Mississippi and 
Missouri valleys had never been adequately 
expressed in literature, but that he himself had 
made a beginning toward it. 

In the following June he journeyed to Canada 
as the guest of the friendly Dr. Bucke. On the 



I 



THE CAMDEN BARD 225 

way lie saw Niagara. " We were very slowly 
crossing the Suspension bridge — not a full stop 
anywhere, but next to it — the day clear, sunny, 
still — and I out on the platform. The falls 
were in plain view about a mile off, but very 
distinct, and no roar — hardly a murmur. The 
river trembling green and white, far below me ; 
the dark, high banks, the plentiful umbrage, 
many bronze cedars, in shadow ; and tempering 
and arching all the immense materiality, a clear 
sky overhead, with a few white clouds, limpid, 
spiritual, silent." He was deeply impressed by 
the Sunday services for the insane at Dr. 
Bucke's asylum, finding beneath those crazed 
faces, " strange as it may sound, the peace of 
God that passeth all understanding,^^ His older 
brother, Jesse, had died in such a retreat ten 
years before. Under Dr. Bucke's guidance, 
Whitman took the impressive trip up the Sag- 
uenay to Chicoutimi, and then, after one of the 
happiest summers of his old age, returned to 
Camden. 

In February, 1881, Thomas Carlyle died. 
Though Whitman had never seen him, he had 
read some of his books with close attention. 
Sartor Resartus was unquestionably one of the 
seed-books from which Leaves of Grass sprang, 
and many passages in Democratic Vistas were 
intended as a reply to Carlyle's pamphlet. 



226 WALT WHITMAN 

Shooting Niagara. Whitman's reverie, at the 
hour of Carlyle's passing, shows the spiritual 
mood which grew more and more characteristic 
of his closing years. 

" In the fine cold night, unusually clear, (Feb- 
ruary 5, '81) as I walk'd some open grounds 
adjacent, the condition of Carlyle, and his ap- 
proaching — perhaps even then actual — death, 
filled me with thoughts eluding statement, and 
curiously blending with the scene. The Planet 
Venus, an hour high in the west, with all her 
volume and lustre recovered, (she has been shorn 
and languid for nearly a year,) including an ad- 
ditional sentiment I had never noticed before — 
not merely voluptuous, Paphian, steeping, fasci- 
nating — now with calm, commanding seriousness 
and hauteur — the Milo Venus now. Upward 
to the zenith Jupiter, Saturn, and the moon past 
her quarter, trailing in procession, with the Plei- 
ades following, and the constellation Taurus and 
red Aldebaran. Not a cloud in heaven. Orion 
strode through the southeast, with his glittering 
belt — and a trifle below hung the sun of the 
night, Sirius. Every star dilated, more vitreous, 
nearer than usual. Not as in some clear nights 
when the larger stars entirely outshine the rest. 
Every little star or cluster just as distinctly vis- 
ible, and just as nigh. Berenice's hair showing 
every gem, and new ones. To the northeast and 



THE CAMDEN" BARD 227 

north the Sickle, the Goat and Kids, Cassiopeia, 
Castor and Pollux, and the two dippers. While 
through the whole of the silent, indescribable 
show, inclosing and bathing my whole receptivity, 
ran the thought of Carlyle dying. (To soothe and 
spiritualize, and, as far as may be solve the mys- 
teries of death and genius, consider them under 
the stars at midnight). 

" And now that he has gone hence, can it be 
that Thomas Carlyle, soon to chemically dissolve 
to ashes and by winds, remains an identity still ? 
In ways perhaps eluding all the statements, lore 
and speculations of ten thousand years — eluding 
all possible statements to mortal sense — does he 
yet exist, a definite, vital being, a spirit, an in- 
dividual — perhaps now wafted in space among 
those stellar systems, which, suggestive and lim- 
itless as they are, merely edge more limitless, far 
more suggestive systems ? I have no doubt of it. 
In silence, of a fine night, such questions are 
answer'd to the soul, the best answers that can 
be given. With me, too, when depress'd by some 
specially sad event, or tearing problem, I wait 
till I go out under the stars for the last voiceless 
satisfaction." ^ 

In April Whitman visited Boston to read the 
Lincoln lecture, and found to his pleasure " a 
good deal of the Hellenic " in the old city, " and 

1 Prose Works, p. 162. 



228 WALT WHITMAN 

the people getting handsome too," especially the 
gray-haired women at his lecture, "healthy and 
wifely and motherly, and wonderfully charming 
and beautiful." He was received with " glowing 
warmth and courtesy " by Longfellow, who had 
visited him in Camden three years before. For 
" two rapt hours " he sat before the collection of 
J. F. Millet's pictures at Mr. Quincy A. Shaw's, 
penetrated and uplifted by the spirit of that great 
artist, between whose genius and that of Whitman 
himself there are so many points of contact. And 
Whitman also stood for a long time late one 
Sunday afternoon, "in silence and half lights, 
in the great nave of Memorial hall, Cambridge, 
the walls thickly cover'd with mural tablets, 
bearing the names of students and graduates of 
the university who fell in the secession war." 
He knew what it signified. 

A few weeks later he went back, after an ab- 
sence of forty years (save for one brief visit) to 
see the village where he was born. Dr. Bucke 
accompanied him, and they drove over the old 
farms of Walt's ancestors, and deciphered the 
moss-grown names in the ancient family burying 
grounds of the Whitmans and Van Velsors. A 
few of the older inhabitants of Huntington re- 
membered him, but there was then, as there is 
to-day, but a scant measure of local pride in 
Whitman's fame. At the Bicentennial of Suffolk 



THE CAMDEN BARD 229 

County, in 1883, the orator of the day pointed 
proudly to poets of the county : " In poetry, 
Terry, Gardiner and Tooker hold no mean place." 
But he forgot Walt Whitman. 

After returning from Long Island, Whitman 
lingered a while in New York and found his 
former host, Pfaff, in a new restaurant on 24th 
Street. The two old men drank to the memory 
of the long vanished frequenters of their shabby 
Bohemia in " big, brimming, fill'd up champagne 
glasses, drain'd in abstracted silence." 

After his visit to Boston in April he had re- 
ceived a proposal, through John Boyle O'Reilly, 
from the firm of James R. Osgood and Company, 
to publish a definitive edition of Leaves of Grass. 
He replied that the edition, if published by this 
house, must be complete : " Fair warning on one 
point, the sexuality odes about which the original 
row was started and kept up so long are all re- 
tained and must go in the same as ever." ^ The 
publishers therefore asked to see the copy, and 
formally accepted the book, agreeing to pay a 
royalty of twelve and one half per cent. For the 
first time since the unlucky Thayer and Eldridge 
edition of 1860 the book was to bear a regular 
publisher's imprint, and the house was one of 
high standing. At the end of August, Whitman 

1 See " Walt Whitman and his Second Boston Publishers," 
Camden Edition, volume viii. p. 276. 



230 WALT WHITMAN 

returned to Boston to see the edition through 
the press. For two or three months he enjoyed 
himself greatly. He made his headquarters at 
the Hotel Bulfinch, spent much of his spare time 
on the Common and by the shore at City Point, 
and was hospitably entertained on all sides. 

The most significant courtesy which he re- 
ceived, came, he thought, from Concord. He 
was the guest of Mr. F. B. Sanborn, and shortly 
after his arrival had a " long and blessed even- 
ing" with Emerson. Whitman described the 
elder poet with one of those graphic little touches 
in which Carlyle alone surpassed him : " a good 
color in his face, eyes clear, with the well-known 
expression of sweetness, and the old clear-peering 
aspect quite the samey The next day Whitman, 
with his host and hostess, was bidden to a family 
dinner at the Emerson home. As is well known, 
Emerson's memory was failing rapidly, and 
his son has noted that he had to be told who 
Whitman was. But to Whitman the dinner was 
deeply symbolical. There is something touching 
in his interpretation of it. 

" I doubt whether there is anything more af- 
fecting or emphatic in Emerson's whole career 
— a sort of last coruscation in the evening twi- 
light of it — than his driving over to Frank 
Sanborn's in Concord Sept. 1881 to deliberate- 
ly pay those * respects ' for which he had obli- 



THE CAMDEN BARD 231 

gated himself twenty-five years before. Nor was 
the unusual compliment of the hospitable but 
formal dinner made the next day for Walt 
Whitman by Mr. and Mrs. Emerson, without a 
marked significance. It was a beautiful autumn 
Sunday. And if that afternoon, with its occur- 
rences there in his own mansion, surrounded by 
all his family, wife, son, daughters, son-in-law, 
nearest relatives and two or three very near 
friends — some fourteen or fifteen in all — if 
that does not mean how Emerson by this simple, 
yet almost solemn rite, wished before he de- 
parted to reiterate and finally seal his verdict of 
1856 [1855], then there is no significance in 
human life or its emotions or actions." * 

Whitman returned to Camden in November, 
and throughout the winter was cheered by the 
moderate success of the Osgood edition, which 
sold about two thousand copies. Then, on March 
1, 1882, came trouble. Oliver Stevens, the Dis- 
trict Attorney at Boston, upon complaint made 
by the Society for the Suppression of Vice, and 
under the direction of State Attorney- General 
Marston, notified Osgood and Company that 
Leaves of Grass was " within the provisions of 

1 From a hitherto unprinted memorandum of " Whitman's 
relations to Emerson," enclosed in a letter to O'Connor on May 
28, 1882, for O'Connor's use in a proposed letter to the New 
York Tribune. 



232 WALT WHITMAN 

the Public Statutes respecting obscene litera- 
ture," and " suggested " its suppression. Whit- 
man, upon receiving word from the publishers 
that they were " naturally reluctant to be iden- 
tified with any legal proceedings in a matter of 
this nature," receded temporarily from his ear- 
lier position, and wrote : "I am willing to 
make a revision and cancellation in the pages 
alluded to — would n't be more than half a 
dozen anyhow — perhaps indeed about ten lines 
to be left out and a half dozen words or phrases." 
But this would not serve. The District At- 
torney furnished a list of the passages and lines 
which must be expunged.^ Whitman, who was 
now getting obstinate again, rejected it " whole 
and several." Then the publishers proposed as 
a probably satisfactory compromise, the omis- 
sion of two poems only,^ — the remaining pas- 
sages to be allowed to stand. Whitman replied : 
" No, I cannot consent to leave out the two 
pieces." There was therefore nothing left for 
the publishers but to stand trial or cease to cir- 
culate the book. They chose the latter course, 
and after an amicable correspondence turned 
over the plates of the book to the author. He 
promptly transferred them to Kees, Welsh and 

1 Given on p. 149 of Bucke's Walt Whitman. 

2 "A Woman Waits for Me," and " To a Common Prosti- 
tute." 



THE CAMDEN BARD 233 

Company, of Philadelphia, who were soon suc- 
ceeded by David McKay. 

" I do not myself," wrote Whitman to O'Con- 
nor, " feel any resentment towards Osgood and 
Company for anything done me or the book — 
They have acted with reference to conventional 
business and other circumstances. Marston is 
the target for you." ^ O'Connor's reconciliation 
with Whitman had but recently taken place, yet 
Walt knew that he could count upon the hot- 
tempered Irishman in this emergency. The New 
York Tribune opened its columns to O'Connor 
on May 25, and he blazed away at his triple 
"target" — Osgood, Marston, and Stevens — 
to his heart's content.^ Other American news- 
papers — with but very few exceptions — were 
outspoken in their condemnation of the ill-advised 
action of the Massachusetts authorities. Post- 
master Tobey of Boston, who had excluded 
Leaves of Grass from the mails, was directed by 
the Washington authorities to revoke his order. 
It proved to be the last attempt at such perse- 
cution. For the remaining ten years of his life, 
though his poetry was frequently ridiculed. Whit- 
man received from the press and the public 
almost unvarying personal kindness and respect. 

1 Unpublished letter of May 17, 1882. 

2 For a portion of this communication, see Bucke's Walt 
Whitman, pp. 150-152. 



234 WALT WHITMAN 

It was during this spring of 1882 that both 
Longfellow and Emerson passed away. No bio- 
grapher or critic of Longfellow has character- 
ized him more felicitously than Whitman in this 
passage from his diary : " He is certainly the 
sort of bard and counteractant most needed for 
our materialistic, self-assertive, money-worship- 
ping, Anglo-Saxon races, and especially for the 
present age in America — an age tyrannically 
regulated with reference to the manufacturer, 
the merchant, the financier, the politician and 
the day workman — for whom and among whom 
he comes as the poet of melody, courtesy, defer- 1 
ence — poet of the mellow twilight of the past! 
in Italy, Germany, Spain and in Northern Eu- 
rope — poet of all sympathetic gentleness — and 
universal poet of women and young people. I 
should have to think long if I were asked to 
name the man who has done more, and in more 
valuable directions, for America." Whitman's 
comment upon Emerson's death, a month later, 
was also very perfect : " A just man, poised on 
himself, all-loving, all-inclosing, and sane and 
clear as the sun." A more formal criticism of 
Emerson, in his Prose Worhs^^ contains some 
penetrating sentences : " His final influence is 
to make his students cease to worship anything 
— almost cease to believe in anything, outside 

1 Page 315. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 235 

of themselves. . . . The best part of Emerson- 
ianism is, it breeds the giant that destroys it- 
self. Who wants to be any man's mere follower ? 
lurks behind every page. No teacher ever taught, 
that has so provided for his pupils' setting up 
independent^ — no truer evolutionist." Such 
passages as these, together with similar ones 
upon Poe, Bryant, Whittier, Burns, and Tenny- 
son, reveal a critical tact, a fineness both of 
perception and of phrasing, which has surprised 
many readers who knew Whitman only as the 
chanter of " barbaric yawps." 

In the autumn of 1882 he published Specimen 
Days and Collect^^ a volume including all of 
his prose then gathered. He wrote to O'Connor : 
"Do you know what ducks and drakes are? 
Well, S. D. \_Specimen Days~\ is a rapid skim- 
ming over the pond-surface of my life . . . the 
real area altogether untouched, but the flat peb- 
ble making a few dips as it flies & flits along 
— enough at least to give some living touches 
and contact points." ^ This was a modest descrip- 
tion of a book which contains much delightful 
and suggestive writing, but which has never won 
an audience at all comparable with its deserts.^ 

1 Rees, Welsh and Company, Philadelphia. Some copies 
have the imprint of David McKay. 

2 From an unpublished letter. 

^ "Nobody cares a damn for the prose," was Whitman's 
terse summary of the situation. 



236 WALT WHITMAN 

Dr. Bucke's biographical and critical study 
entitled Walt Whitman ^ was now ready, and 
was published in 1883. Frankly the work of a 
personal friend and disciple, it nevertheless en- 
deavored to present all the known facts about 
the poet. It gathered a mass of contemporary 
testimony and opinion. In a circular sent out in 
June, 1880, begging for personal memoranda 
about Whitman to be used in preparing this bio- 
graphy, Dr. Bucke had said plainly : " I am 
myself fully satisfied that Walt Whitman is one 
of the greatest men, if not the very greatest man, 
that the world has so far produced." The appen- 
dix contained many of the criticisms called forth 
by the first editions of Leaves of Grass. O'Con- 
nor's " Grood Gray Poet " was included, — re- 
printed in its entirety, with a few verbal changes, 
— and O'Connor introduced it with a new letter, 
more than half as long as his original pamphlet, 
in which he attacked Walt's recent critics with 
unabated fire and fury. All this gave Dr. Bucke's 
book a polemical tone which limited its influence. 
A single well-considered essay like that published 
by Mr. E. C. Stedman in Scrihners (now the 
Century) for November, 1880, — half-hearted as 
it then seemed to Whitman, O'Connor, and Bucke, 
— probably did more to win readers for the poet 
than all the undiscriminating eulogy of the 
1 Philadelphia, David McKay, 1883. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 237 

Whitman Militants. Nevertheless, Dr. Bucke's 
loyalty and zeal have placed every admirer of 
Whitman under obligation to him, and his book 
remains one of permanent interest to students. 

One result of its publication was a renewed 
exchano-e of letters between Whitman and O'Con- 
nor. The former writes, apropos of a slightmg 
reference by Emerson, published not long before 
in the Carlyle-Emerson correspondence : — 

Camden N J 

Feb: 21 '83— p.m. 

.... I am curious to see the Carlyle-Emerson 

letters — (had not heard before about my being 

in them) — You hit long ago on the reason why 

of the Emerson (apparent) change, or defection 

or cloud — whatever it is to be call'd — it was 

the interference, doubtless hard lying, of others, 

— and there was & is a little knot of my most 

malignant enemies, — deadly haters, — in & 

around Boston — some in high quarters — and 

they plied the man incessantly.^ 

One may trace here the evidence, which is to 
be noted increasingly in Whitman's last years, 
of an occasional petulance, — the grievance of a 
man who imagines that he is under persecution. 
That Emerson was ever in this way " plied in- 
cessantly " by any one, is too absurd for serious 

1 From an unpublished letter. 



238 WALT WHITMAN 

refutation. Equally absurd was Whitman's no- 
tion that Ruskin, who had spoken to friends 
about Leaves of Grass, — " Emerson and Whit- 
naan are deadly true — in the sense of rifles — 
against all our deadliest sins " — somehow 
feared to address its author. Yet the letter in 
which he expresses this notion is most interesting. 

Oct. 7 '83. 

The worry of Ruskin with Leaves of Grass 
is that they are too personal, too emotional — 
launched from the fires of myself, my special 
passions, joys, yearnings, doubts appetites &c 
&c : — which is really what the book is mainly 
for (as a type however for those passions, joys, 
workings &c in all the race, at least as shown 
under modern & especially American auspices). 

Then I think he winces at what seems to him 
the Democratic brag of L. of G. 

I have heard from R. several times through 
English visitor friends of his — It is quite cer- 
tain that he has intended writing to me at length 
— & has doubtless made draughts of such writ- 
ing — but defers & fears — & has not yet written. 

R. like a true Englishman evidently believes 
in the high poetic art of (only) making abstract 
works, poems, of some fine plot or subject, stir- 
ring, beautiful, very noble, completed within their 
own centre & radius, & nothing to do with the 



THE CAMDEN BARD 239 

poet's special personality, nor exhibiting the 
least trace of it — like Shakspere's great unsur- 
passable dramas. But I have dashed at the 
greater drama going on within myself <& every 
human being — that is what I have been after?- 

W. W. 

Among the readers of Dr. Bucke's book was 
Lafcadio Hearn, then a struggling journalist in 
New Orleans. He had already been a corre- 
spondent of O'Connor's, and recognized the lat- 
ter's influence in the new volume. One of his 
letters about Whitman is so typical of the feel- 
ing of many of the younger literary men during 
the eighties that a considerable portion of it may 
be given here : — . 

278 Canal Street, 
New Orleans, La. Aug. ^ 

My dear Mr. O'Connor, 

. . . Your beautiful little book — I say your^ 
because I cannot verily distinguish any other jper- 
sonality in it — came like a valued supplement 
to an edition of Leaves of Grass in my library. 
I have always secretly admired Whitman, and 
would have liked on more than one occasion to 
express my opinion in public print. But in jour- 
nalism this is not easy to do. There is no possi- 
bility of praising Whitman unreservedly in the 

^ Unpublished. 



240 WALT WHITMAN 

ordinary newspaper, whose proprietors always 
tell you to remember that their paper " goes 
into respectable families," or accuse you of lov- 
ing obscene literature if you attempt controversy. 
Journalism is not really a literary profession. 
The journalist of to-day is obliged to hold him- 
self ready to serve any cause, — like the condoU 
tieri of feudal Italy, or the free captains of other 
centuries. If he can enrich himself sufficiently 
to acquire comparative independence in this 
really nefarious profession, — then, indeed, he 
is able to freely utter his heart's sentiments and 
indulge his tastes, like that aesthetic and wicked 
Giovanni Malatesta whose life Yriarti has writ- 
ten. 

I do not think that I could ever place so lofty 
an estimate upon the poet's work, however, as 
you give, — although no doubt rests in my mind 
as to your critical superiority. I think that 
Genius must have greater attributes than mere 
creative power to be called to the front rank; — 
the thing created must be beautiful, it does not 
satisfy me if the material be rich. I cannot con- 
tent myself with ores and rough jewels : I want 
to see the gold purified and wrought into mar- 
vellous fantastic shapes ; I want to see the jewels 
cut into roses of facets, or turned as by Greek 
cunning into faultless witchery of nude loveli- 
ness. And Whitman's gold seems to me in the 



THE CAMDEN BARD 241 

ore : his diamonds and emeralds in the rough. 
Would Homer be Homer to us but for the bil- 
lowy roar of his mighty verse — the perfect 
cadence of his song *that has the regularity of 
ocean-diapason ? I think not. And do not all the 
Titans of antique literature polish their lines, 
chisel their words according to severest laws of 
art ? Whitman's is indeed a Titanic voice ; but 
it seems to me the voice of the giant beneath 
the volcano, — half-stifled, half -uttered, — roar- 
ing betimes because articulation is impossible. 

Beauty there is ; but it must be sought for ; 
it does not flash out from hastily turned Leaves ; 
it only comes to one after full and thoughtful 
perusal, like a great mystery whose key-word 
may only be found after long study. But the 
reward is worth the pain. That beauty is cos- 
mical : it is world-beauty : — there is something 
of the antique pantheism in the book, and some- 
thing larger too, expanding to the stars and be- 
yond. What most charms me, however, is that 
which is most earthy and of the earth. I was 
amused at some of the criticisms — especially 
that in the Critic — to the effect that Mr. Whit- 
man might have some taste for natural beauty, 
etc., as an animal has ! Ah ! that was a fine 
touch! Now it is just the animalism of the work 
which constitutes its great force to me — not a 
brutal animalism, but a human animalism, and 



242 WALT WHITMAN 

as the thoughts of antique poets reveal to us : 
the inexplicable delight of being, the intoxica- 
tion of perfect health, the unutterable pleasure 
of breathing mountain wind, of gazing at a blue 
sky, of leaping into clear deep water and drifting 
with a swimmer's dreamy confidence down the 
current, with strange thoughts that drift faster. 
Communion with nature teaches philosophy to 
those who love that communion; and Nature 
imposes silence sometimes that we may be forced 
to think : — the Men of the Plains say little. 
" You don't feel like talking out there," I heard 
one say : " the silence makes you silent." Such 
a man could not tell us just what he thought 
under that vastness, in the heart of that silence : 
but Whitman tells us for him. And he also tells 
us what we ought to think, or to remember, 
about things which are not of the wilderness 
but of the city. He is an animal, if the Critic 
pleases, but a human animal — not a camel that 
weeps and sobs at the sight of the city gates. 
He is rude, joyous, fearless, artless (to me), — a 
singer who knows nothing of musical law, but 
whose voice is as the voice of Pan. And in the 
violent magnetism of the man, the great vital 
energy of his work, the rugged and ingenuous 
kindliness of his speed, the vast joy of his song, 
the discernment by him of the Universal Life, 
— I cannot help imagining that I perceive some- 



THE CAMDEN BARD 243 

thing of the antique sylvan deity, — the faun or 
the Satyr. Not the distorted Satyr of modern 
cheap classics : but the ancient and godly one, 
" inseparably connected with the worship of 
Dionysus " and sharing with that divinity the 
powers of healing, saving and foretelling, not 
less than the orgiastic pleasures over which the 
androgynous god presided. 

Thus I see great beauty in Whitman, great 
force, great cosmical truths sung of in mystical 
words, but the singer seems to me nevertheless 
barbaric. You have called him a bard. He is ! 
But his bard-songs are like the improvisations 
of a savage skald, or a forest Druid : immense 
the thought ! mighty the words : — but the music 
is wild, harsh, rude, primeval. I cannot believe 
it will endure as a great work endures : I cannot 
think the bard is a creator, but only a Precursor 

— only the voice of one crying in the wilderness 

— Make straight the path for the Great Singer 
who is to come after me! And, therefore, even 
though I may differ from you in the nature of 
my appreciation of Whitman, I love the soul of 
his work, and I think it a duty to give all possi- 
ble aid and recognition to his literary priesthood. 
Whatsoever you do to defend, to elevate, to glo- 
rify his work you do for the Literature of the 
Future, for the cause of poetical Liberty, for the 
cause of mental freedom. Your book is doubly 



244 WALT WHITMAN 

beautiful to me, therefore ; and I believe it will 
endure to be consulted in future times, when men 
shall write the " History of the Literary Move- 
ment of 1900," as men have already written the 
Histoire du Homantisme. 

As time went by, Whitman felt a renewed 
desire to have a home of his own. His brother 
and sister-in-law at 431 Stevens Street were 
kind, and he had particularly loved their little 
children. One of them had been named after 
him, and there is a peculiar pathos — if one re- 
calls the secrets of his early life — in the old 
man's sorrow at the child's death. He wrote to 
Mrs. O'Connor; — 

Camden, July 13, (1876) 

Nelly this is a sad house today — little 
Walt died last evening about }4 past 8. Par- 
tially sick but sudden at last — suddenly turned 
to water on the brain — to be buried tomorrow 
afternoon at 4. 

George and Lou are standing it pretty well 

— I am miserable — He knew me so well 

— we had already such good times — and I was 
counting so much.^ 

But completely as he had entered into the 
troubles or the happiness of his brother's house, 

1 Unpublished letter. 



I 



THE CAMDEN BARD 245 

he wanted now to be by himself. In vain did 
John Burroughs try to persuade him to come 
to Esopus to live ; another friend offered him a 
house in Philadelphia. He preferred, with the 
inertia of old age, to "lay up " in Camden. Ac- 
cordingly he purchased in March, 1884, for $1750, 
a small two-story house. No. 328 Mickle Street. 
He had nearly 11300, the proceeds of the Phil- 
adelphia edition of 1883, and George W. Childs, 
with characteristic generosity, loaned him the 
balance. It was a mean house, upon an unlovely 
street. Trains jangled and roared at a railroad 
crossing not far away ; when the wind sat in a 
certain quarter there was a guano factory to be 
reckoned with. The house was hot in summer, 
and had no furnace for the winter months. But 
Whitman was indifferent to its ugliness and 
discomfort. There was a lilac-bush in the back 
yard, and that pleased him. After some experi- 
ment he secured as housekeeper a buxom widow, 
Mrs. Mary Davis. She was a poor cook and a 
slatternly manager, but was good-natured and 
faithful according to her lights. Her passion 
for sewing lace collars on the poet's shirts ex- 
ceeded, however, her zeal for the broom and 
dust-pan. A black cat, a spotted dog, a parrot, 
and a canary, completed the household. 

Such was the rather comfortless home which 
Whitman made for himself at sixty-five, and in 



246 WALT WHITMAN 

which he passed the remaining eight years of his 
life. Here he was visited by hundreds of persons 
eager to look upon his very noble face and to 
touch the hand which he used to extend with a 
royal graciousness. Sometimes they were asked 
to partake of one of his simple meals. Some of 
them brought little gifts : fruit, or his favorite 
mixture of coffee, or a bottle of wine. He loved 
to share these delicacies with the sick and poor 
of the neighborhood. Painters — Eakins, Her- 
bert Gilchrist, Alexander — painted his portrait ; 
sculptors made busts ; photographers, knowing 
that Heaven might never send them another such 
subject, photographed him until, as Whitman 
himself remarked, the very cameras were weary. 
At first he was occasionally found seated in a 
chair on the sidewalk in front of his house. 
Sometimes he would receive callers in the front 
room downstairs, where many unsold copies of 
his books were piled. In the later years visitors 
were shown to the large upper room, where the 
poet usually sat in a stout oak chair by one of 
the windows, a gray wolf-skin flung over the 
back of the chair. Around him was chaos. The 
dirty floor was littered with newspapers and 
magazines, articles of clothing, and bundles of 
old letters and manuscripts, most of these care- 
fully tied up with string. Like the true old bach- 
elor with literary instincts, Whitman was un- 



THE CAMDEN BARD 247 

willing that these piles of precious papers should 
be interfered with by the profane hands of a 
house-cleaner. His order rooted in disorder stood, 
and he would usually poke around among the de- 
bris with his cane and fish out precisely what he 
was looking for. Upon chairs and tables lay 
more papers, shoes, unwashed dishes, and print- 
ers' proofs. Trunks and boxes stood against 
the wall; the bed — very likely not made up — 
was in the corner ; firewood was thrown down 
by the air-tight, sheet-iron stove. He had a few 
books, most of them old friends, like that stout 
edition of Walter Scott preserved since boyhood. 
Here was Buckley's translation of Homer, and 
John Carlyle's Dante, Felton's Greece^ Ticknor's 
Spanish Literature^ George Sand's Consuelo^ 
— whose heroine he thought superior to any of 
Shakespeare's, — Emerson, Ossian, Omar Khay- 
yam and Epictetus, Shakespeare, and a Bible 
which he had kept throughout his life. Many 
photographs of friends and celebrities were upon 
the walls. 

But nothing within the littered, low-ceilinged 
room was worth a glance compared with the 
figure of the bard. Always slow of movement 
and calm in demeanor, he had now settled into 
the immobility of old age. His body was mas- 
sive, inert. His hands still showed the clear 
pink color of the Dutchman. The beard was 



248 WALT WHITMAN 

white, concealing for the most part the full, free 
lines of the throat. The face grew more deli- 
cately modeled with each year, under the re- 
fining, spiritualizing touch of time. The lips 
were firm to the last ; the heavy-lidded gray-blue 
eyes, no longer lustrous, were patient, pensive. 
As the glistening white hair grew thin, that 
wonderful domed head seemed to take on a dig- 
nity and beauty as of some heroic, vanished epoch ; 
it was a presence of such benignity and serenity 
as the New World, since Emerson's passing, 
could not elsewhere show. 

Many a pilgrim came to that grimy Mickle 
Street shrine, much as Alcott, Thoreau, and 
Emerson had journeyed on a like quest to the 
Brooklyn tenement, forty years before. Often 
they came from over-seas. Now it was Henry 
Irving and Bram Stoker ; admiring, as most 
actors have admired, Whitman's instinct for the 
histrionic. Hither came Edmund Gosse, Justin 
M'Carthy, and Dr. Johnston of Bolton, who 
have left close memoranda of their impressions ; 
Ernest Rhys, H. E. Haweis, and Edward Car- 
penter for his second visit. Sir Edwin Arnold 
was another guest. John Morley and Lord 
Houghton had come earlier. Oscar Wilde, too, 
"a great big splendid boy," had arrived in 1882 
in the height of his " sesthetic " lecture season, 
for a two-hours' talk and a milk punch with 



THE CAMDEN BARD 249 

Whitman, mucli to tlie joy of newspaper hu- 
morists.^ Or the caller might be a tramp, an 
anarchist, a socialist, a Japanese art-student, 
an enthusiastic college girl. The old Washing- 
ton friends — Burroughs, Eldridge, O'Connor, 
Doyle — stopped over in Camden when they 
could, although this was seldom. 

Gradually a new set of guardsmen gathered 
around the poet. William Sloane Kennedy, who 
had made Whitman's acquaintance in 1880, while 
working on a Philadelphia newspaper, became a 
frequent visitor, and an active correspondent and 
controversialist in his behalf.^ Other Phila- 
delphia journalists, like Mr. Talcott Williams, 
Mr. Harrison Morris, and Thomas Donaldson, 
served Whitman in many ways, as did Mr. Fran- 
cis Howard Williams and Mr. R. Pearsall Smith. 
A warm friendship sprang up between Whitman 
and Colonel " Bob " Ingersoll, a big-hearted law- 
yer and orator, famous in his day as a " skeptic." 
But the most intimate of the new friends came 
to be Mr. Horace Traubel, a young man who 
had fallen under Whitman's spell upon the poet's 
first arrival in Camden. During Whitman's last 

^ Helen Gray Cone's " Narcissus in Camden, " published in 
The Century^s department of Bric-a-Brac in November,lS82, 
was a witty parody of the supposed conversation of two po- 
seurs. 

^ See his Beminiscences of Walt Whitman, Paisley and Lou- 
don, 1896. 



250 WALT WHITMAN 

years Mr. Traubel was tireless in his attendance ; 
he founded a Walt Whitman Club, and after- 
wards the Walt Whitman Fellowship, as well as 
The Conservator^ a journal which is devoted 
largely to the Whitman propaganda. For years 
he kept a note-book in which he set down im- 
partially everything that fell from Whitman's 
lips ; and he has already begun to publish these 
conversations.^ Together with his brother-in-law, 
Mr. Thomas B. Harned, and Dr. E. M. Bucke, 
Mr. Traubel became Whitman's literary execu- 
tor. Students of Whitman will inevitably differ 
here and there with his biographers upon ques- 
tions of proportion and of taste ; but of Mr. 
Traubel's loyal discipleship it is impossible to 
speak too highly. 

The external events of Whitman's closing 
years were few. Many simple pleasures were 
made possible for him through the kindness of 
the friends who have already been mentioned. 
In 1885, for example, as his lameness increased, 
subscriptions, limited to ten dollars, were asked 
for the purchase of a horse and buggy. The 
necessary amount was instantly made up. Flor- 
ence, Barrett, and Booth among actors, George 
H. Boker, Mr. Wayne MacVeagh, Mr. Talcott 
Williams, and Mr. Charles Emory Smith among 

1 In re Walt Whitman, Philadelphia, 1893 ; With Walt 
Whitman in Camden, Boston, 1906. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 251 

well-known Philadelphians ; Mr. Gilder, Mr. 
Clemens, Warner, Holmes, Whittier, and John 
Boyle O'Reilly among writers elsewhere, thus 
testified their personal good-will for the infirm 
poet.^ 

On April 15, 1886, Talcott Williams and 
Thomas Donaldson arranged for the delivery 
of the Lincoln lecture in the Chestnut Street 
opera house in Philadelphia. There were gener- 
ous subscriptions from Dr. Weir Mitchell, Mr. 
Furness, Boker, and others, in addition to the 
sale of admission tickets, so that a total of 
nearly seven hundred dollars was realized. Whit- 
man declared it "the biggest stroke of pure 
kindness and concrete help I have ever re- 
ceived." In December the Pall Mall Gazette 
of London, upon a rumor that Whitman was 
starving, raised one hundred and twenty-five 
pounds for him, and in the same month Mr. Syl- 
vester Baxter, a Boston friend, sought through 
Congressman Lovering to secure a pension for 
the poet, on the ground of his services to soldiers 
during the Civil War. The attempt was un- 
successful. 

On Washington's Birthday, 1887, Whitman 
was greatly pleased with a reception in his 
honor at the Contemporary Club of Philadel- 

2 Many of their letters are printed in T. Donaldson's Walt 
Whitman, the Man, ch. ix. 



252 WALT WHITMAN 

phia. In the following April, through the 
efforts of R. Pearsall Smith and J. A. Johnston, 
the New York jeweler, Whitman read the Lin- 
coln lecture at the Madison Square Theatre in 
New York. The audience included Mr. Clemens, 
Bunner, Stockton, Mr. Conway, John Hay, 
Edward Eggieston, Mr. St. Gaudens, President 
Oilman, and many others. Lowell and Mr. 
Norton, Mr. Burroughs, Mr. Gilder, and Mr. 
Stedman were in boxes. Mr. Andrew Carnegie 
wrote, enclosing a cheque for f 350 for a box : 
"When the Pall Mall Gazette raised a sub- 
scription for Mr. Whitman, I felt triumphant 
democracy disgraced. Whitman is the great 
poet of America so far." ^ He was honored 
with an evening reception at the Westminster 
Hotel, and was surprised at the universal friend- 
liness manifested. Here is a cheerful letter ^ 
about it addressed to Eldridge, who was now 
settled in California : 

328 Mickle Street 
Camden New Jersey April 21 '87 

Dear C W E yours came this forenoon, & 

was read & re-read, & dispatched on the round 

to Kennedy, John Burroughs & Dr. Bucke — all 

so anxious to get definite news from William.^ 

^ See Kennedy's Reminiscences, p. 29. ^ Unpublished. 

' William O'Connor, already suffering from a malady that 
proved fatal in 1889. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 253 

It someliow seems the most encouraging yet — 
God grant our dear friend may indeed get com- 
plete recovery. Write often as you can, dear 
friend. With me and my affairs no great ripple. 
I am worldlily comfortable & in good physical 
condition as usual of late. I went on to New 
York — was convoyed by my dear old Quaker 
friend R Pearsall Smith, had a success at the 
lecture 14th (netted 600 for myself. Andrew 
Carnegie gave $350 for his box) —had a stun- 
ning reception, I think 300 people, many ladies, 
that evng Westminster Hotel — newspapers 
friendly everybody friendly even the authors 
— and returned here Friday 4pm train from 
N. Y. in good order. Am going over to Phila. 
this pm to be sculp' d by St Gaudiens [sic] 
the N Y sculptor who has come on, to do it. 
Signs of spring rather late, but here. I am 
called to dinner (baked shad) 

Walt Whitman. 

Chakles W. Eldkidge 
P. 0. Box 1705 

Los Angeles California. 

In the autumn of this year some Boston 
friends raised a fund of eight hundred dollars 
for Whitman. " What we want to do," wrote 
Mark Twain in sending a generous contribution, 
" is to make the splendid old soul comfortable." 
In 1888 his sixty-ninth birthday was celebrated 



254 WALT WHITMAN 

by a reception and dinner at Mr. Harned's 
house in Camden. Whitman was in gay spirits. 
Four days later he suffered a succession of 
slight paralytic shocks. Dr. Osier, who was 
called to attend him, was non-commital ; but his 
friends were seriously alarmed.^ A strong young 
man was engaged as his nurse, for he was no long- 
er able to move without assistance. The horse and 
buggy were sold ; Whitman made a new will ; 
and it seemed as if the end were drawing near. 
But in spite of another attack in November, his 
wonderful recuperative powers asserted them- 
selves once more. The winter dragged by. Whit- 
man's letters and postal cards to his friends 
took on even more than ever the form of sick- 
room bulletins. On May 9 another sorrow 
came: O'Connor died in Washington after a 
long and painful illness. He was but fifty-seven. 
On May 31, 1889, Whitman's seventieth 
birthday was celebrated by his friends and 
neighbors in a public hall at Camden.^ The list 
of speakers and of senders of congratulatory 
letters and telegrams included many of the day's 
distinguished names. In April, 1890, he read 

1 The daily incidents of Whitman's life between March 28 
and July 14, 1888, are set forth with great particularity in 
Horace Traubel's With Walt Whitman in Camden. 

^ For a full account of the speeches and messages delivered 
at this dinner, see Camden's Compliments to Walt Whitman, 
Philadelphia, 1889. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 255 

his Lincoln lecture for the last time, at the 
Contemporary Club rooms, and he was able, in 
May, to attend the birthday dinner in his honor 
at Reisser's restaurant in Philadelphia. Thirty 
persons were present, among them Ingersoll, who 
spoke, vAth even more than his wonted eloquence, 
for forty-five minutes. Afterwards, sitting oppo- 
site Whitman, he held a long discussion with 
him on immortality, the orator finding no evi- 
dence for it, and the poet asserting it with a 
tenacious instinct. Reporters scribbled shorthand 
notes while the two celebrities debated. On Oc- 
tober 21, 1890, Whitman made his last public 
appearance, as the guest of honor at a lecture 
delivered for his benefit by Ingersoll at Horti- 
cultural Hall, Philadelphia. The address, after- 
ward printed under the title Liberty in Liter- 
ature^^ was an apologia for Whitman's career. 
The poet had been wheeled on the stage in an 
invalid's chair, and at the conclusion of Inger- 
solFs fervid oratory the bard said a few words 
of thanks to the audience. Then he was wheeled 
back to a half -lighted hotel dining-room, where 
he sat late with Ingersoll, munching a little bread 
dipped in champagne and talking about Death. 
He had never been more picturesque. 

There was one more birthday dinner, cele- 
brated with many friends in the Mickle Street 

1 See In Be Walt Whitman, p. 253. 



256 WALT WHITMAN 

house on May 31, 1891.^ Whitman was seventy- 
two. That privacy which is the normal privilege 
of old age was one of the many kinds of happi- 
^ess which he did not experience. Public inter- 
est in him seemed to increase, through these last 
years. Newspapers found him good " copy," and 
diligent stenographers took down his private as 
well as his public talk. He was no longer able 
to compose save with the greatest difficulty. Yet 
even in his extreme feebleness in 1888, he had 
prepared for the press his November Boughs^ 
a miscellaneous collection of verse and prose. 
The poems are grouped under the title " Sands 
at Seventy." None of them are as notable as 
the prose piece " A Backward Glance o'er 
Travel'd Eoads," which sums up his plans and 
endeavors as a poet, and which is now fitly 
printed as an appendix to his complete poetical 
works. Of the other prose pieces, the most in- 
teresting are the sketches of Elias Hicks and 
Gfiorg-e Fox. The narrative of Hicks's life car- 
ried him back to his own earliest boyhood, and 
he found in the "noiseless silent ecstasy" of 
the Quaker mystic and in his distrust of all 
religious organizations, a spirit akin to his 
own. He writes, for example, to William 
O'Connor : — 

^ A full stenographic account is given in In Re Walt Whit- 
man, p. 297. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 257 

Camden p. m. April 18 '88 

Dear W. O'C. 

Your kind good copious letter came today & 
has been read and reread. Nothing new in the 
monotony of my life — I have rec'd agood plaster 
bust of Elias Hicks, ( size inclined to colossal ) 
wh' I have put open in the corner of my room — 
& I think it does me good — perhaps needful 
almost to me — Elias at the latent base was sen- 
timental-religious like an old Hebrew mystic — & 
though I may have something of that kind way 
in the rear, it is pretty far in the rear & I guess 
I am mainly sensitive to the wonderfulness & per- 
haps spirituality of things in their physical & con- 
crete expressions — and have celebrated all that.^ 

Very suggestive, too, in its revelation of Whit- 
man's old-age estimate of spiritual values, is his 
comparison of George Fox and Shakespeare. 
George Fox, he declared, stood for the deepest, 
most eternal thought latent in the human souj. 
When the richest mere poetry, even Shake- 
speare's, ceases to satisfy, and all worldly or aes- 
thetic or even scientific values have done their 
office to the human character, then this over- 
arching thought of God makes itself manifest. 
*' Most neglected in life of all humanity's attri- 
butes, easily cover'd with crust, deluded and 

1 From an unpublished letter. 



258 WALT WHITMAN 

abused, rejected, yet the only certain source of 
what all are seeking, but few or none find — in 
it I for myself clearly see the first, the last, the 
.deepest depths and highest heights of art, of 
literature and of the purposes of life. I say who- 
ever labors here, makes contributions here, or 
best of all sets an incarnated example here, of 
life or death, is dearest to humanity — remains 
after the rest are gone. And here, for these 
purposes, and up to the light that was in him, 
the man Elias Hicks — as the man George Fox 
had done years before him — lived long, and 
died, faithful in life, and faithful in death." ^ 

He had also been able, in 1888, to see through 
the press a new edition in one volume of his 
Complete Poems and Prose^ and to celebrate 
his seventieth birthday, in 1889, by an autograph 
edition — the eighth — of Leaves of Grass. In 
1891 he issued a slender volume of new poems 
with the pathetic title Good-Bye^ my Fancy^ 
and in the following year, during his last illness, 
he was at work upon the ninth edition of Leaves 
of Grass — the fourth of the Complete Works. 
His final composition was " A Thought of 
Columbus," now published, like Tennyson's 
"Crossing the Bar," at the end of his poems. A 
comparison of the two pieces is curiously sug- 
gestive. 

1 Prose Works, p. 478. 




WALT WHITMAN'S HAND AFTER BARTLETT'S CAST 



THE CAMDEN BARD 259 

Whitman's conversations during this final 
period of his life have been put down with com- 
plete — and even pitiless — accuracy. He was 
never a brilliant talker ; his mind moved too 
slowly, and his words were often halting, repeti- 
tious, and vague. Endowed with plenty of phy- 
sical good-nature, he had nevertheless the true 
prophet's lack of wit and humor in speech ; and 
the seriousness with which he took himself, from 
first to last, limited his conversational range. 
But within his range he was constantly saying 
interesting things. He had, like most men of 
original powers, a vocabulary of his own, whose 
characteristics grew more marked with advan- 
cing age. Whitman's was homely and hearty, 
and sometimes had a flash of the phrase-making 
genius which glows in his earlier verse. 

Of literature as an art he had but little to say. 
" I do not value literature as a profession. I feel 
about literature what Grant did about war. 
He hated war. I hate literature. I am not a lit- 
erary West Pointer ; I do not love a literary man 
as a literary man. ... It is a means to an end, 
that is all there is to it." Like all Transcenden- 
talists, he tended to despise form as compared 
with substance, and though he had meditated 
long and practiced cunningly upon rhythmical 
forms, he never talked that sort of "shop." 
Eloquently as he had written in youth about the 



260 WALT WHITMAN 

function of the great poet, his conversation re- 
vealed but a slender appreciation of the very 
greatest of the brotherhood. " I don't care much 
for Milton or Dante." He enjoyed the simplicity 
of Homer, but Shakespeare was to him something 
" feudal," remote, " lacking both the democratic 
and the spiritual." Of Goethe he seems to have 
known but little. He spoke of Victor Hugo's 
" insularity ; " "I can't swallow Hugo's exag- 
geration and bombast." Coming from Whit- 
man, that verdict is odd enough ; and his judg- 
ment of Dr. Samuel Johnson is surely one of the 
most humorous which literary history records : 
" I don't admire the old man's ponderous arro- 
gance. ... He lacks veracity. . . . Dr. Johnson 
is clearly not our man." Of Sir Walter Scott 
he usually spoke with affection. His written 
judgments of Tennyson are shrewd and skillful. 
Browning " was not for me." Arnold he knew 
■ — and despised — as a critic merely. He dis- 
missed Stevenson with a coarse epithet. He did 
not care for Swinburne's poetry, although when 
Swinburne, in his reaction from earlier enthu- 
siasm, made his famous attack upon Whitman in 
the Fortnightly Heview for August, 1887,^ the 

^ " But Mr. Whitman's Eve is a drunken apple-woman, in- 
decently sprawling in ttie slush and garbage of the gutter 
am.id the rotten refuse of her overturned fruit-stall ; but Mr. 
Whitman's Venus is a Hottentot wench under the influence of 
cantharides and adulterated rum." 



THE CAMDEN BARD 261 

latter refused to answer it in the North Amer- 
ican Iteview^ and contented himself with saying 
philosophically: "Ain't he the damndest sim- 
ulacrum ! " 

Concerning the older generation of American 
poets, — Bryant, Emerson, Longfellow, Poe, 
Whittier — he had written with a delicacy of dis- 
crimination which has already been pointed out. 
Of Cooper, too, he used to speak with enthusiasm. 
He considered Thoreau egotistic. " Thoreau's 
great fault was disdain — disdain for men; in- 
ability to appreciate the average life." Toward 
Lowell he had a "feeling of indifference;" "he 
is not likely to be eternally useful." It is unlikely, 
in fact, that Whitman had ever known much of 
Lowell's work, for during the eighties he told Mr. 
W. K. Thayer, who had just read aloud to him 
the Commemoration Ode^ that he " did n't know 
Lowell vf2iS^critter " — a favorite eulogistic word. 
But Whitman's opinion of most of his Amer- 
ican literary contemporaries was slighting, and 
was obviously affected by their real or imagined 
attitude towards his own work. Yet his comments 
upon Mr. Stedman and Mr. Gilder, who had 
shown him great consideration, make — as re- 
ported by Mr. Traubel — hardly more pleasant 
reading than his offhand condemnation of men 
like Mr. Howells, Mr. James, Mr. Norton, Mr. 
Aldrich, Mr. Cable, and many other honored 



262 WALT WHITMAN 

names. As Ms own strength failed, he seems to 
have grown increasingly suspicious of some cabal 
against him — as when he wrote that his enemies 
had been plying Emerson incessantly, and made 
Emerson afraid to speak out. This was sheer 
pathological mania of persecution. He distrusted 
what he called the " New England crowd,'* " the 
college men." Part of this was due to the old 
antagonism of Poe's day between Boston on the 
one side and New York and Philadelphia on 
the other ; part of it was due to a feeling which 
many of Whitman's later associates shared, that 
the cultivated, college-bred person was out of 
touch with the real forces of American life. 
Whitman was puzzled and irritated by the aca- 
demic temper. Professor Corson of Cornell, for 
example, called upon him and wrote him some 
cordial letters. "Corson seems to have signal 
abilities " — said Whitman — " accepts me in a 
general way, without vehemence. ... I think 
Corson is judicial — probably that is what ails 
him. I like the outright person — the hater, the 
lover — the unmistakable yes or no. . . . The 
scholar swells rarely — I may say never — let 
themselves go." 

Precisely here was the old Komanticist's 
quarrel with Mr. Stedman's essays, Mr. Gil- 
der's poetry, Arnold's criticisms. Booth's act- 
ing : they did not " let themselves go." He 



THE CAMDEN BARD 263 

cried for inspiration, intoxication of the whirl- 
ing dervish kind, like those remembered fren- 
zies that had gone to the making of Leaves of 
Grass. Failing to find this in his contempo- 
raries, he fell back upon himself, with a good 
word for Ingersoll, O'Connor, Symonds, Ken- 
nedy, or other " loyal guardsmen.*' In view of 
his naturally great powers, his intellectual arro- 
gance is more easily to be pardoned than the 
morbid vanity which led him to rank his con- 
temporaries according to their opinion oi Leaves 
of Grass, thus forming an " our crowd " and a 
" not our crowd." But it should be remembered 
that by 1888 he was an old man, and that the 
close atmosphere of a cult is not healthful for 
anybody. Neither Luther, Dr. Johnson, nor 
Goethe — whose table talk we know, and all 
of whom were men of far stronger character 
than Whitman — could have passed unharmed 
through a Camden apotheosis. 

The great mass of Whitman's recorded con- 
versations is devoted to personal and literary 
topics. His callers naturally asked him about 
himself and about certain books. He touched 
occasionally, of course, upon the other enduring 
themes of human intercourse. Like most of the 
American men of letters, he knew but little of 
art, either pictorial or plastic, though during 
the last ten years of his life he had much hap- 



264 WALT WHITMAN 

piness in thinking of J. F. Millet's paintings, 
which he had seen in Boston. In the appre- 
ciation of music, he did not pass beyond the 
Italian opera composers whom he had loved in 
boyhood. Wagner — between whose " music of 
the future " and his own poetry so many com- 
parisons have been drawn — made little im- 
pression upon him. Toward the progress of 
science, however, Whitman was wonderfully re- 
ceptive. Without any of the traits that charac- 
terize the scientific mind as such, he possessed, 
as fully as Goethe or Tennyson, an instinctive 
comprehension of the larger results of the sci- 
entific movement, and particularly of the impli- 
cations of evolution. He liked to talk about 
such things, in a large, vague way, as befits 
a poet. 

He loved also to brood upon the teachings of 
German philosophy. Even in his early manhood 
he had projected a course of Sunday evening 
lectures upon Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. 
The misty grandiose outlines of the Hegelian 
philosophy were particularly congenial to him. 
But he knew no word of German, and could never 
have made himself over into a systematic thinker. 
What attracted him was merely the desultory, 
second-hand " gossip of philosophy," and it has 
hitherto proved impossible for any student of 
that subject to extract from Whitman's writings 



THE CAMDEN BARD ' 265 

and conversations upon it anything approaching 
a coherent scheme. Thiers once said of Louis 
Napoleon that he was unable to distinguish be- 
tween the two verbs rever and reflecJiir. By this 
rule, Whitman's philosophizing was only a sort 
of somnambulism. 

Religion was frequently the theme of Whit- 
man's conversation, as of his verse. Unquestion- 
ably he was a man of deep primitive religious 
instincts. Like most poets, he distrusted formal 
organizations of creed or ritual. One of the par- 
tially illegible entries in his early notes is this : 
" Boldly assume that all the usual priests . . . etc. 
are infidels, and the . . . are Faithful Believers." 
No device of your Wanton Gospeller is quite so 
old as that ! But the precise type of Whitman's 
religion escapes classification. "I am as much 
Buddhist as Christian, as much Mohammedan 
as Buddhist, as much nothing as something." 
It was non-Christian rather than un-Christian. 
Though there was much in his life as in his poe- 
try that is in true accord with the ethical teach- 
ings of Jesus, there is little evidence that Whit- 
man ever consciously apprehended or sympathized 
with the distinctive doctrines of Christianity. 
He said to Dr. Bucke in 1880 : " I have never 
had any particular religious experiences — never 
felt that I needed to be saved — never felt the 
need of spiritual regeneration — never had any 



266 WALT WHITMAN 

fear of hell, or distrust of the scheme of the 
universe. I always felt that it was perfectly right 
and for the best." Emerson would doubtless have 
borne virtually similar testimony. Though more 
profound on its imaginative side, Whitman's re- 
ligion resembles the sentimental Deism of the 
eighteenth century, as exemplified in the famous 
Savoyard Vicar of Rousseau. But as regards 
the churches and preachers of his day, Whitman's 
attitude was that of Voltaire rather than that of 
Jean Jacques. It was the inherited antipathy of 
his Long Island boyhood, maintained throughout 
his life. In his youthful notebook he remarks 
that " the Bible is new exhausted," and speaks of 
"the castrated goodness of schools and churches." 
As an old man he was still irritated by " parsons 
and the police ; " he slammed his windows tight 
on Sunday, to keep out the sound of the bells and 
choir of a neighboring church. " I always mistrust 
a deacon ; his standard is low. . . . The whole 
ideal of the church is low, loathsome, horrible." 
He was in full sympathy with the doughty 
" Bob " Ingersoll's anti-Christian crusade : " It 
does seem as if IngersoU and Huxley without 
any others could unhorse the whole Christian 
giant." He dreamed that a new and better 
religion would reveal itself to humanity, a reli- 
gion of a truer brotherhood and comradeship 
than the world has yet known, and he believed 



THE CAMDEN BARD 267 

that Leaves of Grass^ the herald of the new 
gospel, was "the most religious book among 
books, crammed full of faith." Byron, it will 
be remembered, said much the same thing about 
Don Juan. Whitman's attitude toward the un- 
seen world was always deeply reverent ; like 
most of the mystics, he felt himself immortal, 
and none of the world's poets have written 
more majestically and nobly about death and 
the soul.* As he neared his own end, he gave 
repeated expression to his sense of the evan- 
escence of those material things which he had 
once chanted so robustly. When the German 
Emperor lay dying with cancer of the throat in 
1888, Whitman exclaimed : " Lay not your 
treasures up upon the earth! God knows! no 
one ever heard me preach against life — its final 
joyous realities: yet the physical ingredients 
of life, the things we often set the most store 
by, are perishable, perishable, perishable ! We 
haye them in our hands ! It all comes on such 
fast feet ! I do not say all is vanity : I only say 
certain things are vain. I have seemed to enter 
into the tragedy of Unser Fritz — to have felt 
the flame of the fire that is consuming him." 
It is for such utterances as these that his 

1 See the admirable collection of his utterances on these 
subjects, entitled Whi^ers of Heavenly Death, edited by 
Horace Traubel. Portland, Mosher, 1905. 



268 WALT WHITMAN 

daily talk will be read ; and not for any concrete 
wisdom about politics or human society. Radi- 
cals and conservatives, anarchists and social- 
ists alike have found comfortable doctrine in 
his conversations as in his books. He was a 
stalwart Free Trader, for example, on grounds 
transcending party advantage or even consider- 
ations of national prosperity. He was not afraid 
of the logical consequences of his doctrine of 
the essential brotherhood of all men. There 
was no better Internationalist. No man spoke 
more strongly concerning the corruption that 
flourished in our political life after the close of 
the Civil War. But the fact remains that his 
manner of life had left him ignorant of many 
of the vital forces of his own day. Wholly aside 
from his long invalidism, he was too self-cen- 
tred in his later years to be aware of what was 
actually going on around him. " Give those 
boys a chance," he said to Dr. Johnston of 
Bolton, concerning some urchins who were swim- 
ming in the Delaware River, " and they would 
develop the heroic and manly, but they will be 
spoiled by civilization, religion and the dam- 
nable conventions. Their parents will want them 
to grow up genteel." This was to misunder- 
stand both the parents and the boys. In such 
respects Whittier knew the American people 
much better than Whitman. 



THE CAMDEN BARD 269 

Indeed many of Whitman's contemporaries 
had a far more accurate knowledge than he con- 
cerning the significant social, educational, and 
political movements of the day. Mr. Clemens 
and Mr. Stedman, for example, or John Hay 
and George William Curtis, have had a truer 
perception of American life as a whole. Like 
many Bohemians, Whitman was unaware that 
his quest for a fuller, freer life had in reality 
closed more doors of human experience than it 
had opened. He was a gifted spectator, but he 
could not quite understand some of the men who 
flung themselves into the struggle which he was 
merely watching. He was incapable of estimating 
such contemporary work as was done by Curtis 
for decency in politics, by President Eliot for 
reality in education, and by Phillips Brooks for 
spirituality in religion. Such men were " gentle- 
men," and Whitman seemed irritated by the 
fact that the gentleman may preserve every 
valuable trait of the man, and add thereto ; that 
the gentleman, in short, is the better product. 
In such ways did the "free old hawk" pay 
the penalty of his detachment. Wide human 
wisdom, many-sided contact with a ripened civil- 
ization, or. even the intimate joys and sorrows of 
the home, as they are revealed in such books as 
Lockhart's Scott or Sir Walter's own Journal, 
are not to be looked for in the Bard of Camden. 



270 WALT WHITMAN 

He was, rather, at his best, like Montaigne 
and all the great literary egotists, when he was 
talking about himself. To the very close, in 
s^ite of actual suffering and the more trying 
strain of twenty years of invalidism, he kept up 
good heart. His faith in the permanence of his 
own work rarely wavered. He said late in life 
to Professor G. H. Palmer : " There are things 
in Leaves of Grass which I would no sooner 
write now than cut off my right hand, but I am 
glad I printed them." About six months be- 
fore his death he told Mr. W. R. Thayer that 
he had been reading over Leaves of Grass; 
" and for the first time," he said, " I have had a 
doubt as to whether that book will live." But 
such moods were fortunately transient. Of his 
earliest life he spoke little. In 1880, talking 
with Dr. Bucke, he alluded to the fact of his not 
marrying : " I had an instinct against forming 
ties that would bind me." To Mr. Talcott Wil- 
liams, however, he remarked : "I once thought 
wedlock not needful to my development, but now 
I think it would have been better for me." The 
secretiveness which lurked deep in him lasted to 
the close. Many friends who contributed, out of 
slender means, to his weekly support — since his 
brother George proved unwilling to help him — 
were surprised to find that in 1891 he had spent 
nearly $4000 upon a massive tomb in Harleigh 



THE CAMDEN BARD 271 

Cemetery, and that during his last illness, when 
he was supposed to be penniless, he had several 
thousand dollars in the bank. 

Almost insensibly his long years of invalidism 
lapsed into a final period of swifter dissolution. 
In December, 1891, pneumonia set in, and a 
general breaking-up followed. But he lingered 
until the 20th of March, much of the time in 
great pain. Then, very quietly at the last, in the 
darkening close of a soft, rainy Saturday after- 
noon, he slipped away. Upon the following 
Wednesday he was buried in the tomb he had 
built for himself in Harleigh Cemetery. During 
the middle of the day thousands of people 
streamed through the Mickle Street house to 
look for the last time upon Whitman's wonder- 
ful face. His friends thought it inappropriate 
that the funeral services should be conducted 
by a Christian minister. The ceremonies, which 
were held under a tent near the tomb, in the 
presence of a great company, consisted of read- 
ings by Mr. Francis Howard Williams from 
Whitman, Confucius, Gautama, Jesus, the Ko- 
ran, Isaiah, St. John, the Zend Avesta, and 
Plato, together with affectionate tributes spoken 
by Mr. Thomas B. Harned, D. G. Brinton, Dr. 
Bucke, and Robert G. Ingersoll. Mr. Aldrich, 
Mr. Stedman, and Mr. Gilder sent wreaths of 
ivy and laurel for the coffin. Other well-known 



272 WALT WHITMAN 

men of letters, with Camden and Philadelphia 
friends, acted as pall-bearers. The day, which 
had been overcast, proved fair and mild ; the 
first bluebirds sang while the strange ceremony 
proceeded. Peter Doyle sat on the grassy slope 
outside the tent, not listening to the oratory. 
Peanut venders moved among the outskirts of 
the crowd. It was a Camden holiday. But Whit- 
man's disciples were profoundly moved. " We 
are at the summit," said one. "I felt as if I 
had been at the entombment of Christ," wrote 
another. Others thought, perhaps remembering 
the poet's own serene conviction of immortality, 
that he really was not dead at all, and that in 
some new guise he would come again. For such 
as these the spell woven by Whitman's unique 
personality was unbroken by his bodily death. 



CHAPTER VII 

AFTER FIFTY YEARS 

" My book [Peer Gynt] is poetry ; and if it is not, then it will 
be. The conception of poetry in our country, in Norway, shall 
be made to conform to the book." — Ibsen to Bjornson, De- 
cember 9, 1857. 

" The only poetry that, in the long run, * humanity will not 
willingly let die ' is that which contains not mere variations 
on the old themes, but ' things unattempted yet in prose or 
rhyme.'" — Edward Caibd, Essay on Wordsworth. 

" To-day, in books, in the rivalry of writers, especially nov- 
elists, success (so-called) is for him or her who strikes the 
mean flat average, the sensational appetite for stimulus, inci- 
dent, persiflage, etc., and depicts, to the common caliber, sen- 
sual, exterior life. To such, or the luckiest of them, as we see, 
the audiences are limitless and profitable; but they cease 
presently. While this day, or any day, to workmen portraying 
interior or spiritual life, the audiences were limited, and often 
laggard — but they last forever." — Walt Whitman, Demo- 
cratic Vistas. 

It is already more than half a century since 
the publication of the first edition of Leaves of 
Grass. In the history of world-literature, fifty 
years is but an insignificant space. In the his- 
tory of American letters it is a long period, al- 



274 WALT WHITMAN 

thougli during that interval, singularly enougli, 
no new name has by common consent been ad- 
judged worthy to stand with those of Emerson, 
Hawthorne, Longfellow, Poe, and other writers, 
all of whom had produced mature work before 
1855. The period has been marked, however, 
by extraordinary intellectual and material 
changes, and there has been a constant, if un- 
conscious, shifting of literary perspectives. New 
questions have arisen, and some of the old ques- 
tions have altered in significance. Although 
Leaves of Grass is in its essence one of those 
profoundly imaginative books which cannot be 
comprehended except through the responding 
imagination of the reader, one may nevertheless 
perceive its drift more clearly than was possible 
a half century ago. 

Its author attempted, as we now know, to por- 
tray the emotions of a representative man in 
an age of science and democracy. In the very 
formality and comprehensiveness of this effort 
there lurked a danger, — the danger which Bal- 
zac encountered in the Comedie Hwmaine and 
Zola in his Rougon-Macquart series of novels. 
Such a task transcends, in truth, the imagina- 
tive power of any one artist. Mr. Swinburne, 
writing in 1872,^ — after the first rapture of 
his discovery of Whitman was over, and before 

^ In Under the Microscope. 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 275 

the revulsion betrayed in his Fortnightly Re- 
view article began, — said very keenly: " There 
are in him two distinct men of most inharmo- 
nious kinds ; a poet and a formalist. , . . Never 
before was high poetry so puddled and adul- 
terated with mere doctrine in its crudest form. 
... It is when he is thinking of his part, of 
the duties and properties of a representative 
poet, an official democrat, that the strength 
forsakes his hand and the music ceases at his 
lips." But this very alloy in Whitman's work 
makes the difficult business of analysis some- 
what more easy. The development of science 
and the world-wide spread of democracy are the 
two most striking tendencies of the last half- 
century. They compel attention, whether one 
will or no, and they have increasingly forced the 
literary world to take account of a man who as- 
sumed the gigantic role of speaking in poetry for 
both science and democracy. Whatever the ver- 
dict upon Whitman's performance, it is apparent 
that he has great allies ; that his writings were 
in accord with some of the most profound world- 
movements of his day. No critic who endeavors 
seriously to assess the spiritual forces that are 
shaping our contemporary life can overlook 
Whitman's contribution. Even those judges who 
deny him the name of poet have often admitted 
that there is no American writer more likely to 



276 WALT WHITMAN 

be reexamined, from time to time, by future 
historians of literature. 

Without entering, however, upon the uncertain 
territory of the future, it is already clear that 
Whitman stood in certain well-defined relations 
to the thought and the literature of jfche past. In 
the instinctive operations of his mind he was a 
Mystic, — one of the persons who in every age 
and in every variety of formal religious faith 
have been innately and intensely conscious of the 
reahty of spiritual things. In his capacity for 
brooding imaginative ecstasy he was Oriental 
rather than Western. Deep affinities allied him 
with the oldest literatures of our Indo-European 
race ; his own poetical style was formed largely 
upon that of the Old Testament : he read Hindu 
and Persian poets in the best translations avail- 
able, carried Alger's Oriental Poetry to the 
Washington hospitals to read to wounded sol- 
diers, and made many notes, it is said, in his 
own copy of the BJiagavad-Gita?' His fondness 

1 Emerson once remarked smilingly to F. B. Sanborn that 
Leaves of Grass was a combination of the Bhagavad-Gita and 
the New York Herald. Compare, for example, Whitman's 
well known use of the communal " I " with Krishna's speech 
in the ninth chapter of the Bhagavad-Gita : " I (ego) who am 
present everywhere in divers forms. I am the immolation. I 
am the whole sacrificial rite. I am the libation offered to an- 
cestors. I am the drug. I am the incantation. I am the sacri- 
ficial butter also. I am the fire. I am the incense. I am the 
father, the mother, the sustainer, the grandfather of the uni- 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 277 

for naming himself in his verse, his dervish-like 
passion for the endless Open Road, and even his 
catalogue method, have been noted as having sin- 
gularly close parallels in the poetry of the East. 
Whitman's European kinship was with the 
Romanticists. That stout volume of Sir Walter 
Scott, it will be remembered, was his "inex- 
haustible mine and treasury for more than fifty 
years." Few of the spiritual children of Rous- 
seau, whether upon the Continent or in England, 
have borne so striking a resemblance to their 
parent. Whitman read Rousseau early, and 
planned a poem about him, although he never 
wrote it. Both men were sentimentalists, by 
nature sensuous and egotistic. Both were rhap- 
sodists, uttering wonderfully fine things about 
nature, education, religion. Each had the true 
mystic's incapacity for exact thought, joined 
with an intuitive perception of some very vital 

verse — the mystic doctrine, the purification, the syllable 
' Om ! ' " etc, etc. Or again, in the tenth chapter : " Know that 
among horses I am Uchchaishshravasa, sprung from ambrosia ; 
Airavata among elephants, and among men, the King. . . 
And I am. the procreator, Kandarpa. Among serpents, I am 
Vdsuki. ... I am the Ganges among rivers. ... I am also 
eternal time. . . . And I am Death, who seizes all, and the 
Birth of those who are to be. ... I am the game of dice 
among things which deceive ; splendor itself among splendid 
things. ... I have established, and continue to establish all 
the universe by one portion of myself." 

Translation of J. C. Thomson, Hertford, England, 1855. 



278 WALT WHITMAN 

truths. They were alike in their earnestness as 
in their morbid self-consciousness. Each experi- 
enced a "revelation" which altered the whole 
aspect of life, the transparent summer morning 
described in Leaves of Grass being as epoch- 
making for Whitman, as was that hot walk of 
Rousseau to Vincennes in 1749, when, meditat- 
ing on the question proposed by the Academy of 
Dijon for a prize essay, he suddenly "saw an- 
other world and became a new man." Whitman 
had the sounder body and the more normal mind, 
yet both men shared a suspicion of the cultivated 
world into which they were not born, a hatred of 
restraint, a sort of nomadic irresponsibility. Some 
Ishmaelite of an ancestor transmitted to them 
a strain of the tramp, if not of the dead-beat. 
The curious-minded may trace these personal 
likenesses into such details as their common pas- 
sion for music, for fastidious cleanliness of body, 
and even for carefully selected shirts. Each man 
wrote superbly about paternity, and each de- 
serted his own children. No doubt both men 
repented bitterly, since both were naturally ten- 
der-hearted. 

In their writings, too, as in their lives, they 
plucked at the same vibrating, plangent strings. 
"Back to nature" was the burden of their 
chant ; back to the " natural man," to the ego 
stripped of all artificial and social disguises. To 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 279 

their common " culte du moi " both Rousseau 
and Whitman brought an enthusiasm, an ex- 
altation, a sort of inwardness, which not only- 
placed them among the foremost of literary 
autobiographers, but has given them a passionate 
personal following. Those sinuous, lambent prose 
sentences of Rousseau have their counterpart in 
the flowing rhythms of Whitman's verse. Each 
of them wrote like a true "orator," — to use 
Blake's term, — with an ear tuned to the larger 
effects, and chiefly regardful of sonority, color, 
and movement. Both composed slowly and with 
difficulty, but with an inner heat that fused the 
stubborn words until they flowed at last in glow- 
ing eloquence. Both might well declare, like 
their kinsman Byron, " description is my forte." 
Yet it is to their enduring honor that they de- 
scribed, not merely the picturesque and sublime 
in external Nature, and the haughtiness or 
shamelessness of their own selves, but also the 
sensations and emotions of the great multitude 
of common men. Whitman's collected poems 
now begin with the lines : 
" One's self I sing, a simple separate person 

Yet utter the word Democratic, the word En-Masse." 

The literary ancestry of both of these lines 
runs straight to Jean Jacques. The first recalls 
the Rousseau of the Confessions as depicted in 
its celebrated opening passage ; the second line 



280 WALT WHITMAN 

of Whitman's two-fold theme gives us the Rous- 
seau of the Contrat Social. There, for the 
first time in Europe with anything like equal 
power, was the vision of the vast masses of Eu- 
ropean society, the millions who tilled the fields 
and filled the battle-trenches. It is the reality of 
this illimitable background which vitalizes the 
fantastic theory of origins which the Contrat So- 
cial sets forth. The invented history and econom- 
ics and philosophy of that famous treatise are ab- 
surdly wrong : yet it re-made European politics by 
means of its passionate feeling for the labor and 
sorrow and gladness of the people as a whole. 
Whitman's imaginative vision of the body poli- 
tic was equally real, equally sympathetic. '''Plow- 
ing up in earnest the interminable average 
fallows of humanity — not good government 
merely, in the common sense — is the justifica- 
tion and main purpose of these United States." 
The difference between the two seers was that 
Rousseau, with a scanty faith in human im- 
provement, put the golden age behind us, whereas 
Whitman, writing after a century of democratic 
change and scientific advance, was prophet enough 
to see that the true harvest from the intermin- 
able fallows lies yet in the future. 

Being thus a Mystic by temperament and a 
Romanticist by literary kinship. Whitman came 
to intellectual maturity, as we have seen, in the 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 281 

period of American Transcendentalism. Both the 
mysticism of the Orient, and the extremer forms 
of German and English romanticism, found con- 
genial soil in Concord and Cambridge, in Phil- 
adelphia and New York. The periodical literature 
of the forties was Whitman's only university, so 
far as intellectual stimulus was concerned. To the 
twentieth century reader, many aspects of this 
literature seem as fantastic as anything in Leaves 
of Grass, Margaret Fuller's i)mZ, the Fourierite 
and perfectionist journals, even the files of Fra- 
ser's and Blackwood' s^ contain the extremest 
assertion of unchecked individualism, and a total 
disregard of conventional forms. "Natural-super- 
naturalism " was in the air, and the impulse was 
to strip off shams and clothes together — all 
the hampering garments of civilization — and 
to leave the " natural man " free. To appreciate 
Leaves of Grass as a product — although, as 
has been pointed out in an earlier chapter, a 
belated product — of Transcendentalism, one 
should read it, not after a course in Nietzsche 
and Ibsen, much as they enforce and illuminate 
its teaching from various points of view, but 
after Carlyle's Sartor Hesartus and Emerson's 
Essays and Thoreau's Journal. Its eccentrici- 
ties, like its nobleness, are a part of the sanscu- 
lottism and the exaltation of the time. 

It should not be forgotten, however, that 



282 WALT WHITMAN 

Leaves of Grass^ so far as it has been read at 
all by the American public, has been read by two 
generations which have not troubled themselves 
abput its Transcendental origins and affinities. 
In the ten years following the Civil War, when 
Whitman's fame was growing rapidly abroad, 
and far more slowly in his own country, the lit- 
erature of the forties already seemed remote. 
The readers who glanced at Leaves of Grass 
— and most readers have done so at one time or 
another — received a shock, not so much from its 
Transcendental individualism, as from its evi- 
dent strangeness of form and its naturalistic 
dealing with sex. These have been the two chief 
obstacles to the popular acceptance of Whitman's 
work. In connection with each of them, the 
years have gradually brought the conditions for 
a more sympathetic judgment. 

So far as form is concerned, it is clear that 
since the middle of the nineteenth century there 
has been a fairly steady progress toward a greater 
freedom in the whole field of aesthetic sympathy. 
The sudden expansion of sympathetic feeling 
toward the wilder aspects of Nature, which marked 
the latter part of the eighteenth century in Eng- 
land and elsewhere, has since then been paralleled 
in the field of painting, of music, and of the other 
arts. A generation trained to the enjoyment of 
Monet's landscapes, Rodin's sculptures, and the 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 283 

music of Richard Strauss will not be repelled 
from Whitman merely because he wrote in an un- 
familiar form. The modern tendency to empha- 
size what is significant or characteristic in the 
work of art, — perhaps to a too complete exclusion 
of the question of merely formal beauty, — has 
been favorable to all the great Romanticists, 
Whitman included. Expansions and contractions 
of aesthetic sympathy are among the constantly re- 
curring phenomena with which literature has to 
deal, but there seems to be no immediate prospect 
of any such Classical reaction as would create a 
new impatience with Whitman's irregularities of 
form. 

Indeed, the increased knowledge of the struc- 
ture of many types of world-literature, differing 
widely from the conventional verse forms of 
Western Europe, and yet satisfying the aesthetic 
sense, has rendered our critical formulas more 
flexible. When Leaves of Grass was written, 
the poetical books of the Old Testament, to which 
Whitman was chiefly indebted for his scheme- of 
rhythm, were rarely spoken of as poetry at all. 
To-day both the structural features and the Orien- 
tal imagery of this Hebrew verse are everywhere 
recognized by English readers. Other Oriental 
literatures have grown more familiar than they 
were a haK-century ago, and this literary contact 
of the East with the West will assuredly become 



284 WALT WHITMAN 

far closer in the future. All tliis makes against 
dogmatism as to what " is poetry " and what " is 
not poetry." Emotional effect outweighs any a 
priori argument as to the means by which the ef- 
fect is produced. That Blake is a very eccentric 
poet seems to our generation a less important fact 
than that he is felt to be a true poet. We breed 
too many hybrid plants not to be conscious that 
there may be hybrid types of literature, not less 
beautiful and wonderful than the original stocks. 
In short, the whole contemporary tendency to con- 
sider results rather than processes has made it 
easier for the public to admit that, if to an ever- 
increasing number of persons Whitman performs 
the function of a poet, a poet he probably is. If 
the flying-machine actually flies, how it was built 
matters little. 

The shock resulting from A¥hitman's pecu- 
liarities of form has thus been lessened by a 
wider familiarity with other poetical forms which 
differ from the traditional English verse-types, 
as well as by the tacit assumption that any art- 
form may be justified by its effects. But the 
shock has also been diminished by the knowledge 
that men of other nationalities have accepted 
Whitman's work as that of a true poet. Leaves 
of Grass has been translated, in whole or in 
part, into many European languages. These 
translations are constantly increasing in num- 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 285 

ber. In Italian and German versions especially, 
his rhythms seem to me to lose but little, if any- 
thing, of their original potency. In this respect 
he is again like Byron. That a Frenchman or 
German should find " Mazeppa " more easy to 
translate than "Lines upon Tintern Abbey," 
and more interesting as well, does not prove 
Byron a better poet than Wordsworth. Nor does 
the Continental curiosity about Poe and Whit- 
man, coupled with indifference to LoweU and 
Whittier, prove the soundness of the theory that 
the verdict of foreign contemporaries is likely to 
be the judgment of posterity. But it does prove 
in Whitman's case, as with Scott and Byron 
before him, the presence of a certain largeness 
and power, a kind of communicative emotion, 
which far outweighs, with the foreign audience, 
any delicate command over the last refinements 
of poetic expression. 

His imitators on the Continent, as in England 
and America, have not thus far been able to bend 
his bow. Edward Carpenter, who has a message 
of his own to deliver in Whitmanian verse, 
has handled the instrument not unskillfuUy. 
But most of the experiments in " free verse " 
make but melancholy reading. Whitman's mea- 
sures have been used as a megaphone to shout 
out essentially prose exclamations ; freaks and 
cranks and neurotic women, with here and there 



286 WALT WHITMAN 

a hot little prophet, have toyed with it, and once 
in a while a true poet has used it for the utterance 
of a mood. But they have all lacked Whitman's 
cunning as signally as they have lacked his 
strength. 

The parodists have, upon the whole, been more 
just than his admiring imitators. Such craftsmen 
as Mr. Swinburne, Bayard Taylor, H. C. Bunner 
and J. K. Stephen have given us the very pulse 
of the Whitman machine, — that unlucky ma- 
chine of the " official democrat " which some- 
times kept on revolving when the poet was loafing. 
By skillful use of the catalogue trick, with a few 
foreign phrases mixed with American slang, a 
" Camerado" * or two, a loose syntax, and plenty 
of exclamation points, anybody can turn out a 
fair parody of Whitman. But in such a produc- 
tion as Bunner's " Home Sweet Home (after 
Whitman) " there is more than this ; there is a 
real, affectionate absorption of Whitman's feel- 
ing toward his material ; Bunner is not imitating, 
but actually poetizing, for the moment, as Whit- 
man might have done ; and the result, playful 
as it is, brings us more intimately into the se- 
crets of Whitman's workshop than do the analy- 
ses of the critics. It is a pity that Whitman 
could not have had, like Browning and Tennyson, 

1 A good mouth-filling word which Whitman borrowed, by 
the way, from Scott'g Kenilworth. 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 287 

a sufficient sense of liumor to enjoy such happy 
parodies of himself. 

But critics and translators, parodists and imi- 
tators alike, in spite of all they have done to 
familiarize the world with Whitmanian measures, , 
have left to the future the real aesthetic valua- 
tion of those measures. In the present state of 
metrical science no one can say exactly how much 
influence Whitman has had upon the development 
of poetical forms. That he has been an enfran- 
chising element seems probable. He was neither, 
as one school of critics would have it, " above art " 
and a law unto himself ; nor was he by any 
means the artless unsophisticated rustic, with a 
large and loving nature, but, as Tennyson said 
of him to Phillips Brooks, " no poet." Yet we 
shall not be able to register the precise nature 
of Whitman's service as a craftsman until we 
have invented a scheme of notation adequate for 
the registration of such rhythmical cadences as 
those in which oratory and highly emotional 
prose abound. We know and can notate the 
tunes of verse. We recognize the tunes of speech 
without agreeing upon any system of notation. 
But the field of rhapsody, Whitman's " new and 
national declamatory expression," lying, like the 
varied aria and recitative of oratorio, and the 
chant of the church service, somewhere between 
song and speech, now approximating one type 



288 WALT WHITMAN 

and now another, has not yet been satisfactorily 
charted. Nevertheless, while metricists are ana- 
lysing the process which Whitman employed, 
lovers of literature, in increasing numbers, have 
come to recognize the result. " I am a stickler 
for form in literature," says Mr. Richard Watson 
Gilder, " and one thing that I admire in Whit- 
man is his magnificent form." ^ 

The second obstacle to the popular acceptance 
of Leaves of Grass was its gospel of nudity, — 

" Of physiology from top to toe I sing." 

And this shock, like the shock caused by eccen- 
tricity of form, has grown less with time. Whit- 
man chose deliberately and maintained obsti- 
nately the theory that the body is as divine as the 
soul and that one part of the body is as divine 
as another. It was a logical consequence of his 
monistic philosophy. But that was an ill-starred 
day for the " outsetting bard " when he wrote 
down, among other notes on English history: 
" Vates is frequently used for ' poet.' The Brit- 
ish Yates were priests and physiologists." In his 
double role of priest and physiologist. Whitman 
unquestionably wrote a few passages which gave, 
and still continue to give, great offense to fas- 
tidious readers. Yet these passages usually bear 

^ Cnrnden's Compliments to Wcdt Whitman^ Philadelphia^ 
1889. 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 289 

the mark, not so mucli of his imaginative energy 
as of his automatic describing-machine. Here 
and there is a powerful line or two, not meant 
and not fit for the young; but of the eighty lines 
which O'Connor admitted to be objectionable to 
"malignant virtue," most are as innocent of 
poetry as a physiological chart. To a healthy- 
minded person these lines are like accidentally 
opening the door of the wrong dressing-room : one 
is amused, embarrassed, disenchanted or disgusted, 
according to one's temperament and training. 

At worst, Whitman was immodest rather than 
indecent. No reputable critic, considering his 
writings in their totality, would to-day accuse 
him of eroticism, although he has sometimes 
been read, no doubt, by those who are patho- 
logically unfit for that kind of reading. But he 
has paid, and long will continue to pay, the pen- 
alty which attaches to breaches of conventional 
decorum. In the mystical transport of that first 
revelation of the essential beauty and sacredness 
of every natural object and function, he danced 
as David did before the Ark of the Lord. But 
the rough and ready police-court judgment of 
the world considers, not the religious exaltation 
of the act, but the attendant exposure of the 
person. The kind Emerson made this perfectly 
clear, no doubt, in that famous talk upon Bos- 
ton Common. Whitman went his own way, 



290 WALT WHITMAN 

and took his chances. "I had my choice," he 
said, "when I commenced." Yet time, though 
it has not yet vindicated the wisdom of that 
choice, has absolved him from the charge of 
covert suggestion of evil. The "athletic Amer- 
ica " of the twentieth century, in full accord with 
that portion of Whitman's gospel which glori- 
fies the body, can scarcely understand how that 
gospel was suspected by the white-faced, black- 
coated, dyspeptic persons who, as Mr. James 
Ford Rhodes tells us, were the typical Ameri- 
cans of 1855.^ 

It is not that the young athletes of the present 
day have learned to idolize Whitman either as a 
man or as a poet. They are often suspicious of 
his self-consciousness, and they think that he 
protests too much. Compared physically with a 
natural, sinewy athlete like Lincoln, Whitman 
was always " soft." In spite of his big body and 
his unusual powers of endurance, he was too 
emotional for the role. Nervous invalids like 
Symonds and Stevenson have found him an im- 
mense tonic.2 The real athletes, like those real 
working men whom he longed to influence, have 

1 See Khodes's History of the United States, vol. iii, chap. 12. 

2 Symonds testified : " Leaves of Grass, wliich I first read at 
the age of twenty-five, influenced me more perhaps than any 
other book has done, except the Brble ; more than Plato, more 
than Goethe." Stevenson spoke of it as " a book which tum- 
bled the world upside down for me." 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 291 

been inclined to consider him a bumbug. But 
here, as with the questions of form and of moral- 
ity, time is gradually revealing the truth. No 
Whitman myth, favorable or unfavorable, can 
forever withstand the accumulated evidence as 
to Whitman's actual character. Not in vain was 
he photographed, reported, advertised, Boswell- 
ized. The " wild buffalo strength " myth, which 
he himself loved to cultivate, has gone ; the Sir 
Galahad myth, so touchingly cherished by 
O'Connor, has gone, too; and Dr. Bucke's 
" Superman " myth is fast going. We have in 
their place something very much better ; a man 
earthy, incoherent, arrogant, but elemental and 
alive. 

He was a man, furthermore, who had some- 
thing to say. His early notebooks have now 
revealed the deliberation with which he brooded 
over his message. His known methods of com- 
position have revealed the extreme care with 
which he wrote, — his painstaking preparation 
of lists of words, his patient effort to " make this 
more rhythmical," and to fit each poem into its 
place in his vast scheme. He chose for his theme 
the Modern Man, typified by himself, and placed 
in the United States of America. No doubt 
there are defects in his draftsmanship, but upon 
the whole he drew with splendid justice his pic- 
ture of the "strong-possessed soul." There 



292 WALT WHITMAN 

should be first, he claims, a vigorous physical 
manhood and womanhood ; then a courageous 
heart, and an all-inclusive comradeship. Clean, 
strong, brave, friendly persons are the test of a 
civilization. So much for his doctrine concern- 
ing the units which form our heterogeneous 
democratic society. 

But how are the units to be organized into 
"these States"? Here we touch a singular de- 
fect in Whitman's mind as well as in his art. 
He ignored — sometimes consciously, more often 
unconsciously — those intermediate groups which 
mark the advance of men into the perfection of 
organized society. Compare him with another 
genuinely American and democratic poet, who 
found, like Whitman, some of his finest themes 
in politics, and who loved and celebrated the 
common people. Whittier's roots, like Whit- 
man's, ran deep down in a certain spot of soil, 
but, unlike Whitman, he was never transplanted 
and made a wanderer; he sings of fireside, of 
township and county, of state and section, of 
church and party and organization, and his note 
strikes true upon them all ; his loyalty to his 
commonwealth rings harmoniously with his loy- 
alty to the whole country and to the wider inter- 
ests of mankind, like bells within bells, chiming 
consonant music. But Whitman's mind passes 
immediately from the individual to the mass. 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 293 

He paints men and women, but rarely that 
transfiguring love of the one man for the one 
woman upon which rests the family ; he writes 
glorious tilings about physical fatherhood and 
motherhood, but little about the home ; and upon 
all those countless fealties of neighborhood, of 
social, political and religious cooperation, which 
after all hold our centrifugal individualistic forces 
together and make common progress possible, 
he throws but a careless, casual glance. Beyond 
the unit he knows nothing more definite than 
his vague " divine average " until he comes to 
" these States " and finds himself on sure ground 
again. 

I characterize his phrase the " divine average " 
as a vague one, because he takes no pains to 
use it consistently. Sometimes, apparently, it 
means nothing more than a doctrine of numer- 
ical ratios, as if there were a sacredness in sta- 
tistical tables ; sometimes it is used to praise the 
commonplace because it is the commonplace; 
and then again he fills it with noble significance 
in making it mean the presence of the divine 
in every ordinary " average " man and woman. 
Here is what he says : 

" Painters have painted their swarming groups and the 

centre-figure of all, 
From the head of the centre figure spreading a nimbus 

of gold-colored light, 



294 WALT WHITMAN 

But I paint myriads of heads, but paint no head without 

its nimbus of gold-colored light, 
From my hand from the brain of every man and woman 

it streams, effulgently flowing forever." 

This desire of Whitman's to glorify every- 
body equally is touching in its naivete ; but the 
aspiration is futile, whether in painting a picture 
or in depicting democratic society. To paint a 
picture in that fashion is to overlook the essen- 
tial process of selection, of composition; to 
sketch a society on that plan is to ignore spirit- 
ual values, degrees of achievement and of growth. 
Preraphaelite painters may stick little dots of 
gilt upon a blue ground and call it heaven ; and 
democratic poets may assert that one man is as 
good as another ; but the plain people know 
better. It would be unfair to say of Whitman, 
as Emerson did of Gibbon, " The man has no 
shrine ; a man's most important possession." 
He had altogether too many shrines. Monist as 
he was in philosophy, he was polytheist in prac- 
tice : he dropped on his knees anywhere, before 
stick or stone, flesh or spirit, and swore that each 
in turn was divine. He would have no hierarchy. 
The lesson of gradation, taught by the very stars 
in their courses, he would not learn. The gentle- 
man was no higher than the man, the saint no 
finer product than the sinner. With a soul that 
instinctively cried " Glory ! Glory ! " he never- 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 295 

theless did not perceive that the glory of the 
terrestrial was one, and the glory of the celestial 
was another. 

But when he passes to the depiction of the 
ideal life of the United States, Whitman's gran- 
diose phrases and deep-heaving rhythms, and 
even the very vagueness of his thought, are 
suited to his vast theme. First in real signifi- 
cance, I think, though casual readers of Whit- 
man often overlook it, is the emphasis laid, 
particularly in his later poetry, upon the indebt- 
edness of our Democracy to the Past. " The ship 
of Democracy," he declares, " bears all the past 
with it." Our "present is impelled by the past, 
like a projectile." We are indeed treading the 
soil of a fresh new world, not " red from Europe's 
old dynastic slaughter house," and yet 

" To obey as well as command, to follow more than to 

lead, 
These are also the lessons of our New World ; 
With how little the New after all, how much the old, old 
World. 
Long and long has the grass been growing. 
Long and long has the rain been falling, 
Long has the globe been rolling round." 

These States should be free, not bound to the 
past, though able to profit by it. Whitman 
pushes this doctrine of liberty very far : 

" Resist much, obey little." 



296 WALT WHITMAN 

In thus emphasizing our American contempt 
for statutes and ceremonies, Whitman perhaps 
claims too much for the laissez faire theory : 
but his teaching is interesting in view of the 
present drift in city, state, and nation toward 
centralized power. 

He insists that democratic America must he 
religious. " I say that the real and permanent 
grandeur of these States must be their religion." 
Exactly what Whitman meant by religion eludes 
formulation, as we have already seen. But there 
is no vagueness in his next injunction; namely, 
that we should avoid sectionalism. His own aim 
was, he says, " To put the complete union of the 
States in my songs without any preference or 
partiality whatever." North and South, East 
and West, he would " plant companionship thick 
as trees," he would " found superb friendships." 
Not in vain had the journeyman printer and 
carpenter tramped up and down the states of the 
Union, learning many cities and many men. He 
did endeavor to speak, in quite as true a sense 
as Daniel Webster, "for the country and the 
whole country." And this wholeness was made 
indissoluble. Whitman believed, by the results of 
the Civil War. That war was the one great spir- 
itual crisis of his political faith, as was the 
French Revolution in the experience of Words- 
worth. In his later life he came to think that 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 297 

the war was the "axle" upon which Leaves 
of Grass really turned, and that his book could 
not be understood without a comprehension of 
that struggle. Of its pathos, mystery, carnage, 
jubilant shouts of liberty, he wrote in Brum- 
Taps ; and all the tragedy and glory of the four 
years of conflict were justified, he believed, in the 
ultimate union of brethren. 

Finally, these States, thus united by toil and 
sorrow and bloodshed and joy, have for their 
chief task the laying of a foundation for the future. 
We are still pioneers, the ultimate goal is not 
reached. But some day there shall be a better 
civilization here in America, when " the average 
man is taught the glory of his daily walk and 
trade," and when the masses of men shall live 
too-ether in fraternal faith and comradeship. 

o 

«In this broad earth of ours, amid the measureless 

grossness and the slag, 
Enclosed and safe within its central heart, 
Nestles the seed perfection." 

What then should be the message of American 
Democracy to the world? What may it con- 
tribute to " the good old cause, the great idea, 
the progress and freedom of the race ? " Whit- 
man believed that this " good old cause " would 
always find lovers and, if need be, martyrs here. 
And therefore he celebrated any movement, the 
world over, which made for self-government. 



298 WALT WHITMAN 

This is much : it is more striking now than it 
was fifty years ago, for self-government has 
grown in many quarters to seem something old- 
fashioned, rhetorical, not making for economic 
efficiency. But Whitman's championship of lib- 
erty is not all ; he sang, as few poets have sung, 
the praise of internationalism. He saluted the 
" flag of man." In one of his prose works he wrote : 
" I would inaugurate from America international 
poems. I have thought that the invisible root out 
of which the poetry deepest in and dearest to 
humanity flows is friendship. I have thought that 
both in patriotism and song (even amid their 
grandest shows past) we have adhered too long 
to petty limits and that the time has come to 
enfold the world." Herder said the same thing 
a century earlier. Whitman clothes the thought 
in poetry : — 

" One thought ever at the fore — 
That in the Divine Ship, the World, breasting Time and 

Space, 
All Peoples of the globe together sail, sail the same 

voyage, are bound to the same destination." 

And the goal may be nearer than we have 
thought : — 

" Never were such sharp questions ask'd as this day. 
Never was average man, his soul, more energetic, more 

like a God, 
Lo how he urges and urges, leaving the masses no rest ! 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 299 

His daring foot is on land and sea everywhere, he colo- 
nizes the Pacific, the archipelagoes, 

With the steamship, the electric telegraph, the newspaper, 
the wholesale engines of war, 

With these and the world-spreading factories he inter- 
links all geography, all lands; 

What whispers are these O lands, running ahead of you, 
passing under the seas ? 

Are all nations communing ? is there going to be but one 
heart to the globe ?" 

" Every great poet," said Wordsworth in a 
well-known passage, " is a teacher. I wish to be 
considered either as a teacher or as nothing." * 
By this test Whitman belongs with the great 
poets. One cannot go to him for information 
about the next election, or for panaceas against 
all the evils with which democracy is fighting in 
the twentieth century. But his poetry does, in 
his own words, " free, arouse, dilate " the indi- 
vidual reader. It fulfills what Whitman thought 
should be the aim of all poetry, namely, — to 
fill a man " with vigorous and clean manliness, 
religiousness, and give him good heart as a rad- 
ical possession and habit." With the natural 
dogmatism of a good teacher, he held certain 
views concerning the function of the individual, 
the function of the United States, and the joy- 

^ Compare a remark of Whitman, late in his life, to Mr. 
W. R. Thayer : " I don't value the poetry in what I have 
written so much as the teaching ; the poetry is only a horse 
for the other to ride." 



300 WALT WHITMAN 

ful message of these States to the world. The 
value of those views is very slightly affected 
by the disputable questions about his technical 
craftsmanship as a poet. One may even go as 
far as his friend John Burroughs has gone in 
conceding grave faults. ^ One may admit that 
Whitman's popular reputation, like Browning's, 
will always suffer — and justly suffer — be- 
cause of his artistic shortcomings. " Whether my 
friends claim it for me or not," he once admitted, 
" I know well enough that in respect to picto- 

1 " Nothing but the most uncompromising religious purpose 
can justify certain things in the ' Leaves ; ' nothing but the 
most buoyant and pervasive spirituality can justify its over- 
whelming materiality ; nothing but the most creative imagina- 
tion can offset its tremendous realism ; nothing but the note of 
universal brotherhood can atone for its vehement American- 
ism ; nothing but the primal spirit of poesy itself can make 
amends for this open flouting of the routine poetic, and this 
endless procession before us of the common and the familiar. 

" The home, the fireside, the domestic allurements, are not in 
him ; love, as we find it in other poets, is not in him ; the idyl- 
lic, except in touches here and there, is not in him ; the choice, 
the finished, the perfumed, the romantic, the charm of art and 
the delight of form, are not to be looked for in his pages. The 
cosmic takes the place of the idyllic ; the begetter, the Adamic 
man, takes the place of the lover ; patriotism takes the place 
of family affection ; charity takes the place of piety ; love of 
kind is more than love of neighbor ; the poet and the artist 
are swallowed up in the seer and the prophet." John Bur- 
roughs, Whitman : A Study, Boston, 1896, pp. 149, 186, and 
195 especially. 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 301 

rial talent, dramatic situations, and especially in 
verbal melody and all tlie conventional technique 
of poetry, not only the divine works that today 
stand ahead in the world's reading, but dozens 
more, transcend, (some of them immeasurably 
transcend) all I have done or could do." But 
neither the literary deficiencies which he here con- 
fesses, nor his faults of personal character, mar the 
fundamental soundness of Walt Whitman's views 
concerning those problems of democracy which 
affect us all. He has pointed out the way to 
individual manhood, to comradeship, to world- 
wide fraternity. What matter if he has not all 
the drawing-room virtues and accomplishments 
of your finished poet ? 

Many men know what it is to be lost in the 
woods. People behave very differently in that 
predicament. Some persons cry, others swear ; 
some sit down on a log and whistle ; others beat 
around with the guides in search of the lost path. 
And after a while, one hears some big unkempt 
guide, circling through the underbrush, cry out 
' ' We 're all right ! There 's the clearing ! ' ' There 
will always be some delicate-minded excursionist 
to remark : " That man's voice is too loud. He 
makes me nervous. The expression 'AU right' 
is slang. He is not wearing a collar! He has 
been perspiring. I think he has torn his trousers ! " 

It is like the stout, hearty voice of Walt 



302 WALT WHITMAN 

Whitman, calling out to us who are lost in the 
brush and the swamp of class hatred, race pre- 
judice, economic injustice and social wrong : " All 
right ! Yonder lies the clearing ! There are the 
sunlit heights of peace and goodwill ; and here is 
the path ! " The born disciples of Whitman, hear- 
ing that voice, will take up their packs again, and 
strike into the path behind their leader, were he 
ten times more disreputable looking than he is. 
"Never mind the torn trousers," say they, "lift 
up your eyes and your hearts, and make for the 
clearing ! " 

It is plain that to such readers Whitman is more 
than a mere writer. To them the question whether 
he wrote poetry or prose counts for nothing com- 
pared with the fundamental question whether this 
was or was not a man with something glorious to 
say. To vex his message with academic inquiries 
about the tyj^e of literature to which it belongs 
is like badgering St. Paul about the S3mtax of 
his epistle to the Romans. Whitman has become 
to them no longer a rhapsodist to be read, enjoyed 
and quoted ; he is an ethical force, a regenerator, 
a spiritual discoverer who has brought them 
into a new world. It is no wonder that in their 
enthusiastic personal loyalty they lose all sense 
of literary proportion, and praise Walt Whitman 
in terms that would be extravagant even if ap- 
plied to a poet of the rank of Dante. 





^'^i^ 




1^ ^% 



i(j1^^^ 



.ci>" 











AFTER FIFTY YEARS 303 

No one can read Whitman for twenty-five 
years, as I have done, without comprehending 
this feeling. In certain moods, — and these are 
perhaps the moods of noblest and truest human 
synipathy, — the recognition of Whitman as a 
seer and prophet seems the end of the whole 
matter. But there are other moods, familiar to 
all who have passed much of their lives in inti- 
mate companionship with hooks, in which the old 
persistent question reasserts itself, and one asks, 
whether, after all, there is in Whitman's verse 
the beauty that outlives the generations and gives 
poetry its immortality. It happened not long 
ago that, in examining a bulky collection of news- 
paper and magazine notices of Whitman, I let 
one clipping fall to the floor. On the reverse of 
the slip was printed, as it chanced, Keats' s ode 
" To Autumn," composed on the afternoon of a 
September Sunday, in the year in wliich Walt 
Whitman was born. Involuntarily I murmured 
those rich lines, at once so perfect in feeling and 
so flawless in their form. And I asked myseH : 
" Why is it that this poem — relatively empty 
of ethical significance as it is — is sure to live, 
while we can only say of Whitman's poetry that 
some of it ought to live ? " 

The answer to that question is, I suppose, the 
inevitable one that Keats was the better artist ; 
that in his hands truth and beauty were wrought 



304 WALT WHITMAN 

together into forms instinctively precious to men. 
Whitman, greatly dowered as he was by nature, 
and far transcending Keats in range of imagina- 
tive vision, had but an imperfect control of the 
recognized instrument of poetry, and the new one 
that he strove to fashion has not yet been ap- 
proved by time. 

A longer interval than fifty years must elapse 
before the permanence of this new rhapsodic 
verse can be adequately tested. But it seems 
already obvious that page after page of Whit- 
man is doomed to transiency. Byron and Words- 
worth, Moore and Southey, have written hundreds 
of prosaic pages, which are indeed held together 
by formal verse structure, but which now move 
no man as poetry. But the disintegration already 
apparent in Leaves of Grass is due not so much 
to the circumstance that its contents are but im- 
perfectly wrought into the conventional, tradi- 
tional verse forms. The radical defect is that 
the raw material of fact is but imperfectly crys- 
tallized by the imagination. In passing through 
the creative imagination of a poet crude fact 
undergoes a structural change, like iron trans- 
muted into steel. But often, in Leaves of Grass, 
this change has failed to take place.^ Sometimes 

1 " He lay spread abroad in a condition of literary solution. 
But there lie remained, an expanse of crystallizable substances, 
waiting for the structui-al change that never came ; rich 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 305 

it is not only imagination, but even thought that 
is lacking. " Get from Mr. Arkhurst the names 
of all insects — interweave a train of thought 
suitable," is Whitman's notebook formula for 
composing a proposed poem ; but on page after 
page of Leaves of Grass the names of things 
are prodigally given, while the "suitable thought " 
remains unexpressed. Like many another mystic, 
Whitman was, as it were, hypnotized by phe- 
nomena, in spite of his conviction that phenomena 
are only the symbols of the unseen. Such men, 
when they attempt literature, easily fall into the 
characteristic error of the realists, and in their 
anxiety to present the body of whatever fact 
concerns them, somehow miss its soul. Even in 
that Brooklyn art lecture of 1851, Whitman 
fell into the immemorial heresy of identifying 
nature with art. There is another troubled entry 
in one of his early notebooks, which goes to the 
root of the difficulty : " How shall my eye sep- 
arate the beauty of the blossoming buckwheat 
field from the stalks and heads of tangible 
matter f How shall I know what the life is ex- 
ce2^t as I see it in theflesh,^"^ 

How, indeed ! And yet Wordsworth knew how 

above almost all his coevals in the properties of poetry, and yet, 
for want of a definite shape and fixity, doomed to sit forever 
apart from the company of the Poets." 

Edmund Gossb, Gritcal Eit-Eats, London, 1896, p. 111. 



306 WALT WHITMAN 

when he described the daffodils flashing upon the 
inner eye. Those " stalks and heads of tangible 
matter " are in truth the perishable portion of 
Leaves of Grass, Its faults of taste and propor- 
tion are the familiar faults of the Romantic 
school. It is at times turgid, sprawling, extrava- 
gant ; here are bathos and vulgarity ; a vanity 
like Whistler's; Byron's rhymed oratory with- 
out even the clever rhymes ; Hugo's vague human- 
itarian theorizing without the sustained sonorous 
splendor. When the imagination of Byron and 
Hugo is in full activity, all such faults are car- 
ried away as with a flood ; they are the merest 
debris upon its foaming surface. But with Whit- 
man the tangible matter often chokes the imagi- 
native flood ; there are too many logs in the 
stream ; the observer anddescriber are too much 
for the poet. The trouble with Whitman's ag- 
glutinative or catalogue method is not that he 
makes catalogues, but that the enumerated ob- 
jects remain inert objects merely. He is often 
like a yard-man coupling parlor-cars whose names 
are rich in individual associations — Malvolio, 
Manitoba, Mazzini, Manchuria, Maria. But how- 
ever excitedly those musical names are ejaculated, 
this does not start the train. The difficulty with 
the comprehensive architectural scheme into which 
the successive editions of Leaves of Grass were 
slowly fitted is not that it is comprehensive and 



AFTER FIFTY YEARS 307 

architectural, but that the poet, like Fourier and 
Swedenborg and other system-makers, §ub-let so 
much of his contract to the theorizer. Systems 
pass, and democracies alter their form and mean- 
ing, and the very face of the earth is changed ; 
and yet those lines " To Autumn," improvised by 
an imagination that perceived not merely the 
phenomena but the secret spirit of the September 
afternoon, remain as imperishable as that Gre- 
cian urn which Keats himself chose to typify 
the immutability of beauty. 

But Whitman, too, in spite of the alloy which 
lessens the purely poetic quality and hence the 
permanence of his verse, is sure, it seems to 
me, to be somewhere among the immortals. He 
will survive, not so much by the absolute perfec- 
tion of single lyrical passages, as by the ampli- 
tude of his imagination, his magical though in- 
termittent power of phrase, and the majesty with 
which he confronts the eternal realities. Upon 
the whole the most original and suggestive poetic 
figure since Wordsworth, he gazed steadily, like 
Wordsworth, upon the great and permanent ob- 
jects of nature and the primary emotions of man- 
kind. Of the totality of his work one may well 
say, " The sky o'erarches here." Here is the wide 
horizon, the waters rolling in from the great deep, 
the fields and cities where men toil and laugh and 
conquer. Here are the gorgeous processionals 



308 WALT WHITMAN 

of day and night, of lilac-time and harvest. The 
endless mystery of childhood, the pride of man- 
hood, the cahn of old age are here ; and here, too, 
at last is the 

" Dark mother always gliding near with soft feet," 

the hush and whisper of the Infinite Presence. 
These primal and ultimate things Whitman felt 
as few men have ever felt them, and he expressed 
them, at his best, with a nobility and beauty such 
as only the world's very greatest poets have sur- 
passed. Numbers count for nothing, when one is 
reckoning the audience of a poet, and Whitman's 
audience will, for natural reasons, be limited to 
those who have the intellectual and moral gener- 
osity to understand him, and will take the pains 
to do so. But no American poet now seems 
more sure to be read, by the fit persons, after 
one hundred or five hundred years. 



INDEX 



INDEX 



Alcott, a. Bronson, visits Whit- 
man, 119. 

Aldrich, Thomas Bailey, 271 . 

Alexander, J. W., paints portrait of 
Whitman, 246. 

Alger, William R., Oriental Poetry, 
276. 

American poet, task of the, 75. 

American Review, the, tales by 
Whitman in, 26. 

Antislavery movement, Whitman's 
interest in, 32, 38, 48. 

Arnold, Sir Edwin, guest of Whit- 
man, 248. 

Arnold, Matthew, 260, 262 ; letter to 
O'Connor about Whitman, 177- 
179. 

Ashby, Mrs., widow of Gen. Turner 
Ashby, 146. 

Ashton, J. H., secures Whitman a 
clerkship in attorney-general's 
office, 165. 

Aster, John Jacob, 13. 

Aurora, The Daily, edited by Whit- 
man, 22. 

Barrett, Wilson, 250. 

Baxter, Sylvester, tries to get pension 

for Whitman, 25. 
Benjamin, Park, prints Whitman's 

novel, Franklin Evans, in the New 

World, 27. 
Bentzon, Th. (Madame Blanc), 

writes on. Whitman in the Revue 

des Deux Mondes, 198. 
Bhagavad-Gita, the, and Leaves of 

Grass, 276 n. 
Bible, the English, influence on 

Whitman's style, 96, 276, 283. 
Binns, Henry Bryan, Walt Whit- 

man, 133 n., 219 n. 
Bjornson, Bjornstjerne, on Whit- 
man, 198. 
Blair, Hugh, on Macpherson's Os- 

sian, 90. 
Blake, Harrison G. O., letter of 

Thoreau to, about Whitman, 120. 
Blake, William, 79, 88 ; Swinburne 

compares Whitman and, 186, 187. 



Blood-3foney, antislavery poem by 
Whitman, 32, 33. 

Boker, George H., 250, 251. 

Booth, Edwm, 250, 262. 

Brinton, Daniel G., speaks at Whit- 
man's funeral, 271. 

Brooklyn Eagle, the, edited by 
Whitman, 40. 

Brooklyn Freeman, the, launched 
by Whitman, 48. 

Brother Jonathan, Whitman's con- 
tributions to, 26, 30. 

Brown, F. Madox, lends Mrs. Gil- 
christ Whitman's poems, 188. 

Brush, Hannah. See Whitman. 

Bryant, William Cullen, relations 
with Whitman, 119. 

Buchanan, Robert, writes about 
American neglect of Whitman, 
216 ; rejoinder of G. W. Curtis, 
218. 

Bucke, Dr. Richard Maurice, bio- 
grapher of Whitman, 2 «., 52 n., 70 
n., 132, 265, 270, 271, 291; hia 
Walt Whitman, 166 n., 232 n., 233 
n., 236, 239 ; a mystic, 222 ; first 
meeting with Whitman, 223 ; one 
of Whitman's literary executors, 
223, 250 ; entertains Whitman in 
Canada, 224. 

Bunce and Huntington, publishers 
of O'Connor's Good Gray Poet, 
166 n., 174. 

Bunner, H. C, as a parodist of 
Whitman, 286. 

Burroughs, John, 39, 55, 57 n., 212, 
223, 245 ; friendship with Whit- 
man begun, 160 ; publishes Notes 
on Walt Whitman as Poet and 
Person, 180 ; his judgment of 
Whitman, 182, 300 n. 

Caird, Edward, quoted, 273. 
Cairns, William, on Ruskin's " prose 

poetry," 84, 85. 
Calamus, Whitman's letters to Peter 

Doyle, 44, 126, 160, 161, 162. 
Calder, Mrs. Ellen M. (formerly 

Mrs. W. D. O'Connor), 149, 159. 



312 



INDEX 



Camden, N. J., George Whitman's 
home, 210, 211 ; Walt settles there, 
214 ; and finally buys a house, 
245. 

Camden'' s Compliments to Walt 
WMtman, 254 n., 288 n. 

Carlyle, Thomas, influence on Whit- 
man, 225, 226; Whitman's rev- 
6rie at time of Carlyle's death, 
226. 

Carnegie, Andrew, 252, 253. 

Carpenter, Edward, 285 ; Days with 
Walt Whitman, 45 ; visits Whit- 
man at Camden, 222. 

Cauldwell, William, describes Whit- 
man, 22, 23. 

Channing, William F., recom- 
mended by Emerson to buy Leaves 
of Grass, 98 n. 

Chase, Salmon P., declines to ap- 
point Whitman to office because 
of his " notorious " book, 144. 

Chesterton, G. K., on pleasure, 47. 

Childs, George W., aids Whitman 
with a loan, 245. 

Clarke, Edward, early friend of 
Whitman, 14. 

Clemens, Samuel L. (" Mark 
Twain"), 251, 253. 

Cold Spring, N. Y., 1, 3, 5. 

Cone, Helen Gray, "Narcissus in 
Camden," 249 n. 

Coney Island, one of Whitman's re- 
sorts, 36. 

Conservator, The, 250. 

Conway, Moncure D., 185 ; visits 
Whitman, 119 ; praises him in 
Fortnightly Revieio, 18 n. 

Cooper, J. Fenimore, admired by 
Whitman, 261. 

Corson, Prof. Hiram, comments of 
Whitman on, 262. 

Culpeper, Va., 144-146. 

Curtis, George William, quoted, 
158 ; letters to O'Connor about 
Whitman and The Good Gray 
Poet, 172-175; rejoinder to Rob- 
ert Buchanan, 218, 219. 

Dana, Charles A., contrasted with 
Whitman, 64, 65 ; advises Whit- 
man to use Emerson's commenda- 
tion, 114. 

Dartmouth College, Whitman de- 
livers Commencement Poem at, 
203-210. 

Davis, Mrs. Mary, Whitman's house- 
keeper in Camden, 245. 

Democratic Review, the, Whitman's 
contributions to, 23-25. 



Democratic Vistas, 192, 225; argu- 
ment of, 195-197 ; translated into 
Danish, 198 ; Whitman's aim in, 
200 ; quoted, 273. 

Dickens, Charles, defended by 
Whitman, 26. 

Dixon, Thomas, friend of Ruskin, 
183. 

Donaldson, Thomas, 249, 251 ; Walt 
Whitman, the Man, 138, 194, 251 n, 

Dowden, Edward, 183, 217, 218 ; con- 
tributes to Westminster Review a 
notable article on Whitman, 197 ; 
Whitman's first letter to, 198-203. 

Doyle, Peter, 67 ; Whitman's inti- 
macy with 161, 163, 182, 192, 205, 
212, 215, 272 ; his testimony as to 
Whitman's habits, 162 ; Whit- 
man's letters to, printed in Cal- 
amus, 162. 

Drum-Taps, 133, 143, 149; Trow- 
bridge triesto find a publisher for, 
144 ; Whitman's opinion of, 150, 
151 ; first edition printed at his 
expense, 154 ; Sequel to, 154 ; em- 
bodies the spirit of the war, 155, 
156. 

Eakins, Thomas, paints portrait of 
Whitman, 246. 

Eldridge, Charles W., one of Whit- 
man's publishers, 126, 127 ; clerk 
in army paymaster's office, 135 ; 
letters from Whitman, 142, 192, 
252; in internal revenue office, 
159. 

Emerson, Ralph Waldo, rhythm in 
his Essays, 84 ; letter to Whitman 
about Leaves of Grass, 99 ; Whit- 
man's misuse of the letter, 114- 
118 ; visits Whitman, 119, 128 ; 
writes Carlyle about Leaves of 
Grass, 122 ; sends Whitman 
money for destitute soldiers, 137, 
138 ; comments of Whitman on, 
202, 234, 237 ; gives dinner to 
Whitman, 230, 231 ; characteriza- 
tion of Leaves of Grass, 276 n. 

Farnam, C. H., Descendants of John 
Whitman cited, 2 n. 

Florence, William J., 250. 

Fowler and Wells, publish second 
edition of Leaves of Grass, 111 ; 
afterward refuse to sell it, 118. 

Fox, George, compared with Shake- 
speare, 257. 

Franklin Evans, Whitman's novel, 
27, 28. 

Freiligrath, Ferdinand, writes of 



INDEX 



313 



Whitman in Allgemeine Zeiiung, 
197. 
Furness, H. H., 251. 

Garrick, David, used to write no- 
tices of his own plays, 105. 

Garrison, William Lloyd, 38. 

Gilchrist, Alexander, 188. 

Gilchrist, Mrs. Anne, 19 ; first reads 
Whitman's poems, 188-190; wiites 
" A Woman's Estimate of Walt 
Whitman," 190 ; lives in Phila- 
delphia, 190, 222. 

Gilchrist, Grace, 19. 

Gilchrist, Herbert, Ldfe of Anne 
Gilchrist, 190 n. ; paints portrait 
of Whitman, 246. 

Gilder, Richard Watson, 251, 262, 
271 ; admires Whitman's literary 
form, 288. 

Godey, Walter, Whitman's office 
substitute, 215= 

Good-Bye, my Fancy, 258. 

Good Gray Poet, The, O'Connor's 
pamphlet, 166-171, 236. 

Gosse, Edmund, 248 ; quoted, 304 n. 

Grant, Ulysses S., Whitman's con- 
fidence in, 147. 

Hale, Edward Everett, reviews 
Leaves of Grass, 101. 

Hale, John P., 38. 

Hapgood, Major, gives Whitman 
employment in Washington, 135. 

Harlan, Secretary James, dismisses 
Whitman from Indian office, 165. 

Harleigh Cemetery, Whitman's bur- 
ial place, 271. 

Harned, Thomas B., one of Whit- 
man's literary executors, 250, 254, 
271. 

Harrison, G., 73, 74. 

Haweis, Rev. H. R., 248. 

Hay, John, aids Whitman, 141, 142. 

Heam, Lafcadio, letter to O'Connor 
about Whitman, 239-244. 

Hicks, Elias, Quaker preacher, 45 ; 
Whitman's sketch of, 256, 257. 

Higginson, T. W., quoted, 63, 64. 

Hine, Charles, paints portrait of 
Whitman, 126. 

Holmes, Oliver Wendell, 251. 

Hotten, John Camden, 185; pub- 
lishes Rossetti's Poems of Walt 
Whitman, 187 n. 

Houghton, Lord, 248. 

Howells, William Dean, makes Whit- 
man's acquaintance at Pfaff's, 129. 

Hugo, Victor, considered bombastic 
by Whitman, 260. 



Hunt, Leigh, published criticisms of 

his own work, 105, 106. 
Huntington, N. Y., birthplace of 

Whitman, 1-3, 7, 8, 17, 228. 

Ibsen, Henrik, quoted, 273. 

In Re Walt Whitinan, cited, 49, 98, 

112, 190, 250, 255, 256. 
Ingersoll, Col. Robert G., 86 ; warm 

friendship with Whitman, 249, 

255, 266, 271. 
Irving, Henry, guest of Whitman, 



James, William, Varieties of Reli- 
gious Experience, 223 n. 

Johnson, Dr. Samuel, Whitman's 
judgment of, 260. 

Johaston, J. H., New York friend 
of Whitman, 222, 252. 

Keats, John, ode " To Autumn," 
303, 307. 

Kennedy, William Sloane, his Rem- 
iniscences of Walt Whitman,\0\; 
an active friend of Whitman, 249, 
252. 

Lafayette, Marquis, 12, 13. 

Leaves of Grass, 67-131; quoted, 1, 
11, 12, 21, 37 ; its origins, 46, 47 ; 
Whitman sets the type with his 
own hands, 68 ; in no sense an im- 
promptu, 68 ; its purpose, 68, 77, 
151, 274 ; physical appearance of 
first edition, 73 ; importance of 
its preface, 74; subject of the 
poem, 78, 79 ; comment of Thoreau 
on, 80 ; eccentricities of form, 
81-83, 282-287 ; general rhythmic 
type, 83; its "prose poetry," 
84 ; oratorical effects, 85, 86 ; in- 
debtedness to music, 86 ; literary 
parallels to its structure, 91-95 ; 
influence of the English Bible, 96, 
283 ; its superb declamation, 96, 
97 ; first two editions bore no 
publisher's imprint, 97, 113 ; small 
sale, 98, 113 ; praised by Emerson, 
99; but not by most other Ameri- 
can men of letters, 100 ; divergent 
reviews, 100-105; friendly criti- 
cism of Edward Everett Hale, 101 ; 
compared with Tennyson's Maud, 
101, 111 ; Whitman's own reviews 
of the book, 105-112 ; second edi- 
tion issued (1856) by Fowler and 
Wells, 113, 114 ; offensive use of 
Emerson's words of praise, 114- 
118 ; Fowler and Wells refuse to 



314 



INDEX 



sell the book, 118 ; Emerson writes 
Carlyle about, 122 ; third edition 
issued (1860) by Thayer and El- 
dridge, 126; contains new por- 
trait, 126 ; good sales, 126 ; fourth 
edition (1866), 180, 186 ; fifth edi- 
tion (1871), 194; sixth edition, 
the Centennial (1876), 217 ; Sartor 
Meearius one of its seed-books, 
225 ; definitive edition issued by 
James R. Osgood & Co., 229 ; sup- 
pressed by Society for the Suppres- 
sion of Vice, 231; plates trans- 
ferred to Rees, Welsh & Co., 232 ; 
eighth edition (1889), 258 ; char- 
acterized by Emerson, 276 ; a pro- 
duct of Transcendentalism, 281 ; 
indebted to the Old Testament, 
283 ; translations of, 284 ; strange- 
ness of its form, 282-287 ; its gos- 
pel of nudity, 288-290 ; its radical 
defect, 304-306. 

Leaves of Grass Imprints, 100 n., 
112 ra. 

Leeds, Rev. Dr. Samuel P., Dart- 
mouth College pastor, 205. 

Lincoln, Abraham, Whitman's im- 
pressions of, 140, 147, 153 ; shot, 
154 ; Whitman's poems on, 154- 
157 ; remark on first seeing Whit- 
man, 166, 169 ; memorial address 
on, 224, 227, 251, 252, 255. 

Long Island Patriot, Whitman 
learns type-setting in office of, 14, 
15. 

Long Islander, the, Whitman's first 
real venture, 17, 18. 

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 
quoted, 214; visits Whitman, and 
later entertains him, 228 ; Whit- 
man's characterization of, 234. 

Lowell, James Russell, 25 ; con- 
trasted with Whitman, 64, 65 ; 
his "Commemoration Ode" and 
Whitman's " When Lilacs Last 
in the Door-Yard Bloom'd," 
157; Whitman indifferent to, 
261. 

McCarthy, Justin, 248 ; Reminis- 
cences, 1 19 n. 

McClure, , engages Whitman for 

New Orleans Crescent, 41, 42. 

McKay, David, one of Whitman's 
publishers, 233, 235. 

Macpherson, James, Poems of Os- 
sian, 90. 

MacVeagh, Wayne, 250. 

Miller, Joaquin, one of Whitman's 
correspondents, 202. 



Millet, Jean Francois, his paintings 

enjoyed by Whitman, 228, 264. 
Blirror, the. Whitman's early pieces 

in, 15. 
Mitchell, Dr. S. Weir, 251. 
Monahan, Michael, prints example 

of "prose poetry," 86. 
More, Paul Elrner, writes critical 

essay on Whitman, 87 n. 
Morley , John, guest of Whitman, 248. 
Morris, George P., 15. 
Morris, Harrison S., 249. 
Municipal government, Whitman's 

plea for better, 59-61. 
Myers, Frederick W. H., 182, 183. 

New Orleans Crescent^ Whitman on 

staff of, 41, 42. 
Neiv World, the, prints Whitman's 

only novel, 27. 
Norton, Charles Eliot, 262. 
November Boughs, 256. 

Ocean, influence on Whitman, 11, 12. 

O'Connor, William Douglas, first 
meeting with Whitman, 127 ; aids 
him, 134, 135, 158; letters of 
Whitman to, 149-152, 237, 238, 
257 ; described by Whitman, 158 ; 
his novel, Harrington, a failure, 
159 ; assistant superintendent of 
the Life-Saving Service, 159; pub- 
lishes The Good Gray Poet, 166- 
171 ; letters from G. W. Curtis, 
172-175 ; from Wendell Phillips 
and Henry J. Raymond, 176 ; from 
Matthew Arnold, 177 ; his story, 
" The Carpenter," 186; estranged 
from Whitman, 212; reconciled, 
233; letter from Lafcadio Hearn 
about Whitman, 239 ; fatal illness 
and death, 252 n., 254. 

O'Reilly, John Boyle, 229, 251. 

Osgood, James R., and Company, 
published definitive edition of 
Leaves of Grass, 229 ; forced to 
withdraw it, 231, 232. 

Osier, Dr. William, attends Whit- 
man, 254. 

Ossian, Poems of, 72 ; read by Whit- 
man throughout his life, 90. 

Pall Mall Gazette raises fund for 

Whitman, 251. 
Palmer, George Herbert, 270. 
Parker, Theodore, his copy of Leaves 

of Grass, 98 n. 
Passage to India, 194; Whitman's 

own opinion of, 195. 
Paumauok, Indian name of Long 



INDEX 



315 



Island, 12 ; used by Whitman as 
a pen name, 29, 33 n. 

Pfaff's famous restaurant, in New 
York, 38, 39, 129, 131, 229. 

Phillips, Wendell, admired by Whit- 
man, 38; sends him money for 
destitute soldiers, 138 ; on O'Con- 
nor's Good Gray Poet, 176. 

Poe, Edgar Allan, style imitated 
by Whitman, 29; prints piece by 
Whitman in the Broadway Jour- 
nal,, 35. 

Poet, the, Whitman's conception of, 
75-77. 

Proctor, Thomas, reminiscences of 
Whitman, 163, 164. 

Quincy, Josiah P., describes Emer- 
son's annoyance at Whitman's 
misuse of his praise, 114, 115. 

Raymond, Henry J., letter to 
O'Connor, 176. 

Eedpath, James, sends Whitman 
money for destitute soldiers, 137. 

Kees, Welsh & Co., Philadelphia 
publishers of Whitman's books, 
232, 233, 235. 

Rhodes, James Ford, on typical 
Americans, 290. 

Rhys, Ernest, visits Whitman, 248. 

Richardson, Charles F., gives ac- 
count of Whitman's Commence- 
ment Poem at Dartmouth College, 
203-205. 

Ritter, Mrs. Fanny Raymond, 86. 

Roe, Charles A., recollections of 
Whitman as a teacher, 16, 17. 

Rome, Andrew and James, printers 
in Brooklyn, 68. 

Roosa, Dr. D. B. St. John, writes 
interesting account of Whitman 
as nurse, 131. 

Rossetti, William M., 183, 216, 217 ; 
aids Whitman's reputation in Eng- 
land, 184-186 ; publishes selec- 
tions from his poems, 187. 

Rousseau, Jean Jacques, parallel- 
isms of his genius and Whitman's, 
52, 69, 266, 277-280 ; his Contrat 
Social, 52, 280 ; his Confessions not 
liked by Whitman, 69, 279. 

Ruskin, John, "prose poetry" of, 
84, 85 ; Whitman writes O'Connor 
about, 238, 239. 

St. Gaudens, Augustus, 253. 
Sanborn, Frank B., 275 n. ; has 
Whitman as guest in Concord, 230. 
Sandwich, Mass., 2. 



Sartor Hesartus, " prose poetry " of, 
84 ; one of the seed-books of 
Leaves of Grass, 225. 

Schmidt, Rudolph, translates Demo- 
cratic Vistas into Danish, 198. 

Schumaker, J. G., on Whitman's 
habits and character, 28, 38. 

Scott, Prof. F. N., on Whitman's 
prosody, 87, 88 n. 

Scott, Sir Walter, Whitman's fond- 
ness for his novels, 14, 36 ; and for 
his poems, 15, 277. 

Scott, William Bell, 183, 218. 

Scudder, Horace E., sends a copy of 
Drum-Taps to W. M. Rossetti, 184. 

Shakespeare, Whitman's criticism 
of, 260. 

Shaw, Quincy A., 228. 

Shelley, Percy Bysshe, contrasted 
with Whitman, 97. 

Sidgwick, Henry, 118. 

Skinner, Charles M., describes Whit- 
man's editorials, 40, 41. 

Smith, Charles Emory, 250. 

Smith, R. Pearsall, Quaker friend 
of Whitman, 249, 252, 253. 

Society for the Suppression of Vice, 
Boston, causes suppression of 
Leaves of Grass, 231, 232. 

Specimen Days and Collect, 11, 12, 
34, 221, 224 ; published, 235. 

Spenser, Edmund, published self- 
criticisms, 105, 106. 

Stedman, Edmimd Clarence, 160, 
262, 271 ; writes on Whitman in 
Scribner's, 236. 

Stephen, J. K., parodist of Whit- 
man, 286. 

Stephens, Oliver, district attorney 
at Boston, 231, 232. 

Stevenson, Robert Louis, 260; 
influenced by Leaves of Grass, 
290 «. 

Stillman, William J., founder of the 
Crayon, 101, 192, 218. 

Stoker, Bram, 248. 

Story, William Wetmore, contrasted 
with Whitman, 64, 65. 

Strangford, Lord, comme.nds Whit- 
man in Pall Mall Gazette, 180. 

Sumner, Charles, 136. 

Sunday restrictions. Whitman's 
memorial against, 57-59. 

Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 183, 
194, 260 and n., 274, 275, 286 ; 
opinion of Whitman's " When 
Lilacs Last in the Door-Yard 
Bloom'd," 156 ; points out spirit- 
ual kinship of Whitman and 
Blake, 186, 187. 



316 



INDEX 



Smnton, John, characterizes Whit- 
man as a " troglodite," 47 ; laughs 
at his attempts to declaim, 124. 

Symonds, John Addington, friend 
and admirer of Whitman, 44, 183, 
185 ; influence of Leaves of Grass 
on, 290 ra. 

Taylor, Bayard, as a parodist of 
Whitman, 286. 

Taylor, "Father" Edward, the 
sailor preacher, 129. 

Taylor, Gen. Zachary, described by 
Whitman, 42. 

Tennyson, Alfred, Maud reviewed 
together with Leaves of Grass, 
101, 111 ; correspondence with 
Whitman, 193, 202. 

Thacher, John Boyd, 205 n. 

Thayer and Eldridge, publish 
third edition of Leaves of Gi^ass, 
126 ; have financial troubles, 130. 

Thayer, William Roscoe, 270, 299 n. ; 
reads Lowell's " Commemoration 
Ode" to Whitman, 261. 

Thoreau, Henry David, 67, 96 n., 
261 ; comment on Leaves of Grass, 
80; visits Whitman, 119; writes 
to H. Q. O. Blake about him, 120. 

Timber Creek, Whitman's residence 
on, 219-222. 

Tobey, Edward S., postmaster of 
Boston, excludes Leaves of Grass 
from the mails, 233. 

Transcendentalism, American, 62- 
66. 

Traubel, Horace, on Whitman's 
friendships, 87 ?i. ; one of Whit- 
man's literary executors, 249, 250; 
With Walt Whitman in Camden, 
cited, 198, 250, 254 ; edits Whispers 
of Heavenly Death, 267 n. 

Trowbridge, John Townsend, rem- 
iniscences of Whitman, 127, 128 ; 
tries in vain to find a publisher 
for Drum-Taps, 144 ; letters of 
Whitman to, 144, 147, 152. 

Tufts CoUege, Whitman writes 
Commencement poem for, 216. 

Tupper, Martin Farquhar, 103 ; pop- 
ularity of his Proverbial Philoso- 
phy, 90, 91. 

Tyrrell, Prof. Robert Y., 183. 

Van Velsor, Maj. Cornelius, grand- 
father of Whitman, 5, 6. 

Van Velsor, Louisa. See Whitman. 

Vincent, Leon H., American Liter- 
ary Blasters cited, 165 n. 

Voices from the Press, 49 7i. 



Warner, Charles Dudley, 250. 

Warren, Samuel, The Lily and the 
Bee 92-95. 

West Hills, N. Y., 3, 9, 10, 11. See 
also Huntington. 

"When Lilacs Last in the Door- 
Yard Bloom'd," Whitman's dirge 
for Lincoln, 154 ; Swinburne's 
opinion of, 156 ; one of the finest 
imaginative products of the Civil 
War period, 157. 

Whitman, Andrew Jackson, brother 
of Walt, 9 ; death of, 141, 143. 

Whitman, Edward, youngest bro- 
ther of Walt, 9. 

Whitman, George Washington, bro- 
ther of Walt, 9, 48, 49, 147, 270; 
comments on Leaves of Gh-ass, 98 ; 
wounded at Fredericksburg, 133, 
134; a captain of infantry, 135; 
captured and exchanged, 153 ; in 
Camden, 210, 211 ; death of hie 
son Walter, 244. 

Whitman, Mrs. Hannah (Brush), 
grandmother of Walt, 4. 

Whitman, Hannah, sister of Walt, 
210. 

Whitman, Isaiah, 7. 

Whitman, Jesse, grandfather of 
Walt, 4. 

Whitman, Jesse, older brother of 
Walt, 8 ; dies insane, 225. 

Whitman, John, ancestor of most 
of the American Whitmans, 2 n. 

Whitman, John, Sr., 3. 

Whitman, Joseph, first known an- 
cestor of Walt, 2, 3. 

Whitman, Mrs. Louisa (Van Velsor), 
mother of Walt, 5-7, 10, 19; doubt- 
ful about his poetry, 98 ; extracts 
from letters of Walt to, 133, 136, 
138, 140, 141, 148, 181, 192; iU- 
ness and death, 210, 211. 

Whitman, Marcus, 7. 

Whitman, Martha, sister-in-law of 
Walt, 211. 

Whitman, Nehemiah, great-grand- 
father of Walt, 3, 4, 7. 

Whitman, Mrs. Nehemiah, 4. 

Whitman, Stephen, 7. 

Whitman, Thomas Jefferson 
("Jeff"), brother of Walt, and 
object of his special care, 9, 141; 
with Walt in New Orleans, 42, 43 ; 
wife dies, 211 ; visited by Walt in 
St. Louis, 224. 

Whitman, Walter, father of Walt, 
4, 5, 7, 10, 11 ; death, 98. 

Whitman, Walt (Walter), birth- 
place, 1,8; ancestry, 2-4 ; father 



INDEX 



317 



and mother, 4-6, 10 ; brothers and 
Bisters, 8, 9 ; home life in child- 
hood, 9, 10 ; in Brooklyn, 11; 
sports, 12; kissed by Lafayette, 13; 
schooling, 13, 14; early reading, 
14, 15 ; lawyer's clerk, doctor's 
clerk, printer, 14; first writings, 
15 ; teaches school, 16; starts the 
Long Islander, 17 ; excessive emo- 
tional endowment, 19, 20; be- 
comes editor of the Daily Aurora, 
22; personal appearance, 22, 23, 
74, 109, 110; contributes to the 
Tattler, and writes stories for the 
Democratic Review, 23; condemns 
capital punishment, 25; defends 
Charles Dickens, in Brother Jon- 
athan, 26; writes tales for the 
American Review, 26; writes a 
novel for the New World, 27; how 
the novel was written, 28; charac- 
teristics of his early prose, 28, 29 ; 
his earliest verse, 29-33; gains 
familiarity with city life, 34, 35 ; 
influence of theatre and opera, 
35, 36, 41, 42 ; choice of books, 37, 
247; not a systematic student, 37 ; 
no church-goer, 38 ; political sym- 
pathies, 38, 41, 48, 125; stumps 
for Van Buren and for Polk, 38 ; 
edits Brooklyn Eagle, 40; goes to 
New Orleans, 41 ; returns to New 
York, 43; his children, 44-4G; 
never a libertine, 46, 47 ; gray at 
thirty, 48 ; launches the Brooklyn 
Freeman, 48; lecturing, 49-55; 
interest in Rousseau, 52, 69, 277 ; 
works with his father as a carpen- 
ter, 55 ; writes memorial against 
Sunday restrictions, 57-59; and 
for better city administration, 59- 
61 ; contrasted with W. W. Story, 
C. A. Dana, and Lowell, 64, 65 ; 
issues Leaves of Grass, 68, 97 ; 
some notebook entries, 69, 70, 
88 ; rules for composition, 71, 72 ; 
ideas in regard to style, 71, 72 ; 
steel engraving of, in Leaves oj 
Grass, 73, 74 ; his conception of 
the poet, 75-77 ; his indebtedness 
to music, 86 ; analyzes his own 
metrical system, 87; impatient 
of the restraints of formal art, 
88 ; admired Ossian, 90 ; reception 
of first edition of Leaves of Gretas, 
97-105 ; Transcendental strain 
in, 103 ; writes notices of Leaves 
of Grass, 105-112 ; describes him. 
self, 109, 110 ; offends Emerson 
114,' 115 ; has distinguished visit 



ors, 119 ; his manner and habits, 
123; borrows money and specu- 
lates, 123, 124 ; plans to become 
a lectui-er, 124 ; composed with 
extreme care, 125; portrait by 
Hine, 126; temporary residence 
in Boston, 127 ; makes warm 
friends there, 127 ; conversation 
with Emerson, 128; becomes vol- 
unteer nurse among New York 
stage-drivers, 131, 134; goes 
to Falmouth, Va., to care for 
his brother George, 134 ; has his 
pocket picked in Philadelphia, 
134 ; remains in Washington with 
wounded soldiers, 135-142; em- 
ployed in army paymaster's of- 
fice, 135 : his working theory aa 
a nurse, 139 ; visits his mother, 
141, 142, 192; letter to C. W. 
Eldridge, 142; letters to J. T. 
Trowbridge, 144, 147 ; refused an 
office by Secretary Chase because 
he had written a "notorious" 
book, 144; health gives way, 148 ; 
returns to Brooklyn, 149 ; writes 
O'Connor about Drum-Taps, 149- 
151; in Washmgton hospitals 
again, 152, 155; gets clerkship in 
Indian Bureau, 153 ; iasnes Drum- 
Taps and writes his great poems 
on Lincoln, 154 ; friendship with 
John Burroughs begun, 160; 
intimacy with Peter Doyle, 161- 
163 ; dismissed by Secretary Har- 
lan, 164, 165; gets clerkship in 
attorney-general's office, 165 ; be- 
gins to save money, 181 ; Eng- 
lish friends, 183, 184 ; selections 
from his poems published by 
Rossetti, 187, 188 ; correspondence 
with Tennyson, 193, 202 ; writes 
poem for American Institute Ex- 
hibition, 194; publishes Demo- 
cratic Vistas, 1 95-197 ; foreign re- 
cognition, 197 ,'T^; first letter 
to Edward Dowden, 198-203; 
delivers Commencement poem 
at Dartmouth College, 203-210 ; ] 
reviews it himself, 206-210;: 
partially paralyzed, 210 ; death of 
his mother, 211 ; his reticence, 
212, 213, 270 ; becomes a semi- 
invalid, 215; but composes verse 
occasionally, 215; writes poem 
for Tufts College Commencement, 
216 ; distinguished subscribers to 
sixth edition of his works, 217, 218 ; 
outdoor life on Timber Creek, 
219-222 ; memorial address on Lin- 



318 



INDEX 



coin, 224, 227, 251, 252, 255 ; makes 
journey to Rocky Mountains, 224; 
visits Dr. Bucke in Canada, 224, 
225 ; revisits his birthplace, 228 ; 
James R. Osgood & Co. issue de- 
finitive edition of Leaves of Grass, 
229 ; significant hospitalities in 
Boston* and vicinity, 230; Leaves 
of Grass suppressed in Boston, 
231, 232 ; but reissued in Phila- 
delphia, 233 ; comments on Long- 
fellow and Emerson at their death, 
234 ; letters to O'Connor about 
Emerson and Ruskin, 237, 238; 
Lafcadio Hearn's estimate of, 239- 
244 ; buys a house, 245 ; visited 
by hundreds, 246 ; distinguished 
guests, 248; new friends, 249, 
252 ; subscribers to purchase of 
horse and buggy for him, 250, 251 ; 
public receptions, 251, 252 ; has 
slight paralytic shocks, 254 ; last 
public appearance, 255 ; final com- 
position, 258; conversations, 259- 
270; opinions of literature and 
authors, 259-263; knew little of 
art and music, 263, 264 ; his re- 
ligion, 265-267, 296 ; buys massive 
tomb, 270 ; death and burial, 271, 
272 ; poet of science and demo- 
cracy, 275, 292-301 ; a Mystic, 276, 
277, 280 ; a Romanticist, 277, 280 ; 
influenced by Transcendentalism, 
281 ; two chief obstacles to pop- 
ularity, 282-288; his imitators 



and parodists, 285, 286 ; his gos- 
pel of nudity, 288-290 ; a man 
who had something to say, 291, 
302 ; compared with Whittier, 
292 ; his " divine average " vague, 
292, 293 ; his ideal of democracy, 
295-299; contrasted with Keats 
as a poet, 303, 304; his radical 
defect, 304-306 ; most original 
poetic figure since Wordsworth, 
307. 

"Whitman, Walter, nephew of Walt, 
244. 

Whitman, Rev. Zechariah, of Mil- 
ford, Conn., 2 n. 

Whittier, John Greenleaf , 9, 25, 251 ; 
burns presentation copy of Leaves 
of Glass, 100 ; compared with 
Whitman, 292. 

Wilber, Oscar F., 138, 139. 

Wilde, Oscar, 248. 

Williams, Amy (afterwards Mrs. 
Cornelius Van Velsor), Whitman's 
grandmother, 5. 

Williams, Francis Howard, 249; 
reads at Whitman's funeral, 271. 

Williams, Capt. John, 6. 

Williams, Talcott, active friend of 
Whitman, 249-251 , 270. 

WooUey, Mary (Mrs. John Wil- 
liams), 6. 

Worthington, New York publisher, 
issues many editions of Leaves of 
Grass without paying royalty, 
126. 



ElectrotyPed and Printed by H. O. Houghton &* Co. 
Cambridge, Mass., U.S. A. 














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